The essentials of mysticism, and other essays

By Evelyn Underhill

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Title: The essentials of mysticism
        And other essays

Author: Evelyn Underhill

Release date: August 7, 2024 [eBook #74203]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1920

Credits: Susan E, David King, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ESSENTIALS OF MYSTICISM ***


                      The Essentials of Mysticism




                      THE ESSENTIALS of MYSTICISM

                            AND OTHER ESSAYS

                                   BY
                            EVELYN UNDERHILL

                                  1920
                      NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.

                            LONDON & TORONTO
                         J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.


_All rights reserved_




                                CONTENTS


Preface . . . v

The Essentials of Mysticism . . . 1

The Mystic and the Corporate Life . . . 25

Mysticism and the Doctrine of Atonement . . . 44

The Mystic as Creative Artist . . . 64

The Education of the Spirit . . . 86

The Place of Will, Intellect, and Feeling in Prayer . . . 99

The Mysticism of Plotinus . . . 116

Three Mediæval Mystics . . . 141

    I. “THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS” . . . 141

    II. THE BLESSED ANGELA OF FOLIGNO . . . 160

    III. JULIAN OF NORWICH . . . 183

Mysticism in Modern France . . . 199

    I. SŒUR THÉRÈSE DE L’ENFANT-JÉSUS . . . 199

    II. LUCIE-CHRISTINE . . . 215

    III. CHARLES PÉGUY . . . 228




                                PREFACE


The essays collected in this volume have been written during the past
eight years. They deal with various aspects of the subject of mysticism:
the first half-dozen with its general theory and practice, and special
points arising within it; the rest with its application as seen in the
lives and works of the mystics, from the pagan Plotinus to the Christian
contemplatives of our own day. Most of them have already appeared
elsewhere, though all have been revised and several completely
re-written for the purposes of this book. “The Essentials of Mysticism”
and “The Mystic as Creative Artist” were first printed in _The Quest_;
“The Mystic and the Corporate Life,” “Mysticism and the Doctrine of
Atonement,” and “The Place of Will, Intellect, and Feeling in Prayer” in
_The Interpreter_; “The Education of the Spirit” in _The Parents’
Review_; “The Mysticism of Plotinus” in _The Quarterly Review_; “The
Mirror of Simple Souls” and “Sœur Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus” (under the
title of “A Modern Saint”) in _The Fortnightly Review_; “The Blessed
Angela of Foligno” in _Franciscan Essays_; “Julian of Norwich” in _The
St. Martin’s Review_; and “Charles Péguy” in _The Contemporary Review_.
All these are now republished by kind permission of the editors
concerned.

E. U.

_August 1920._




                      THE ESSENTIALS OF MYSTICISM


What are the true essentials of mysticism? When we have stripped off
those features which some mystics accept and some reject—all that is
merely due to tradition, temperament or unconscious allegorism—what do
we find as the necessary and abiding character of all true mystical
experience? This question is really worth asking. For some time much
attention has been given to the historical side of mysticism, and
some—much less—to its practice. But there has been no clear
understanding of the difference between its substance and its accidents:
between traditional forms and methods, and the eternal experience which
they have mediated. In mystical literature words are frequently confused
with things, and symbols with realities; so that much of this literature
seems to the reader to refer to some self-consistent and exclusive
dream-world, and not to the achievement of universal truth. Thus the
strong need for re-statement which is being felt by institutional
religion, the necessity of re-translating its truths into symbolism
which modern men can understand and accept, applies with at least equal
force to mysticism. It has become important to disentangle the facts
from ancient formulæ used to express them. These formulæ have value,
because they are genuine attempts to express truth; but they are not
themselves that truth, and failure to recognize this distinction has
caused a good deal of misunderstanding. Thus, on its philosophic and
theological side, the mysticism of western Europe is tightly entwined
with the patristic and mediæval presentation of Christianity; and this
presentation, though full of noble poetry, is now difficult if not
impossible to adjust to our conceptions of the Universe. Again, on its
personal side mysticism is a department of psychology. Now psychology is
changing under our eyes; already we see our mental life in a new
perspective, tend to describe it under new forms. Our ways of describing
and interpreting spiritual experience must change with the rest, if we
are to keep in touch with reality; though the experience itself be
unchanged.

So we are forced to ask ourselves, what is the essential element in
spiritual experience? Which of the many states and revelations described
by the mystics are integral parts of it; and what do these states and
degrees come to, when we describe them in the current phraseology and
strip off the monastic robes in which they are usually dressed? What
elements are due to the suggestions of tradition, to conscious or
unconscious symbolism, to the misinterpretation of emotion, to the
invasion of cravings from the lower centres, or the disguised fulfilment
of an unconscious wish? And when all these channels of illusion have
been blocked, what is left? This will be a difficult and often a painful
enquiry. But it is an enquiry which ought to be faced by all who believe
in the validity of man’s spiritual experience; in order that their faith
may be established on a firm basis, and disentangled from those unreal
and impermanent elements which are certainly destined to destruction,
and with which it is at present too often confused. I am sure that at
the present moment we serve best the highest interests of the soul by
subjecting the whole mass of material which is called “mysticism” to an
inexorable criticism. Only by inflicting the faithful wounds of a friend
can we save the science of the inner life from mutilation at the hands
of the psychologists.

We will begin, then, with the central fact of the mystic’s experience.
This central fact, it seems to me, is an overwhelming consciousness of
God and of his own soul: a consciousness which absorbs or eclipses all
other centres of interest. It is said that St. Francis of Assisi,
praying in the house of Bernard of Quintavalle, was heard to say again
and again: “My God! my God! what art Thou? and what am I?” Though the
words come from St. Augustine, they well represent his mental attitude.
This was the only question which he thought worth asking; and it is the
question which every mystic asks at the beginning and sometimes answers
at the end of his quest. Hence we must put first among our essentials
the clear conviction of a living God as the primary interest of
consciousness, and of a personal self capable of communion with Him.
Having said this, however, we may allow that the widest latitude is
possible in the mystic’s conception of his Deity. At best this
conception will be symbolic; his experience, if genuine, will far
transcend the symbols he employs. “God,” says the author of _The Cloud
of Unknowing_, “may well be loved but not thought.” Credal forms,
therefore, can only be for the mystic a scaffold by which he ascends. We
are even bound, I think, to confess that the overt recognition of that
which orthodox Christians generally mean by a personal God is not
essential. On the contrary, where it takes a crudely anthropomorphic
form, the idea of personality may be a disadvantage; opening the way for
the intrusion of disguised emotions and desires. In the highest
experiences of the greatest mystics the personal category appears to be
transcended. “The light in the soul which is increate,” says Eckhart,
“is not satisfied with the three Persons, in so far as each subsists in
its difference ... but it is determined to know whence this Being comes,
to penetrate into the Simple Ground, into the Silent Desert within which
never any difference has lain.” The all-inclusive One is beyond all
partial apprehensions, though the true values which those apprehensions
represent are conserved in it. However pantheistic the mystic may be on
the one hand, however absolutist on the other, his communion with God is
always personal in this sense: that it is communion with a living
Reality, an object of love, capable of response, which demands and
receives from him a total self-donation. This sense of a double
movement, a self-giving on the divine side answering to the self-giving
on the human side, is found in all great mysticism. It has, of course,
lent itself to emotional exaggeration, but in its pure form seems an
integral part of man’s apprehension of Reality. Even where it conflicts
with the mystic’s philosophy—as in Hinduism and Neoplatonism—it is still
present. It is curious to note, for instance, how Plotinus, after
safeguarding his Absolute One from every qualification, excluding it
from all categories, defining it only by the icy method of negation,
suddenly breaks away into the language of ardent feeling when he comes
to describe that ecstasy in which he touched the truth. Then he speaks
of “the veritable love, the sharp desire” which possessed him, appealing
to the experience of those fellow mystics who have “caught fire, and
found the splendour there.” These, he says, have “felt burning within
themselves the flame of love for what is there to know—the passion of
the lover resting on the bosom of his love.”

So we may say that the particular mental image which the mystic forms of
his objective, the traditional theology he accepts, is not essential.
Since it is never adequate, the degree of its inadequacy is of secondary
importance. Though some creeds have proved more helpful to the mystic
than others, he is found fully developed in every great religion. We
cannot honestly say that there is any wide difference between the
Brahman, Sūfi, or Christian mystic at their best. They are far more like
each other than they are like the average believer in their several
creeds. What is essential is the way the mystic feels about his Deity,
and about his own relation with it; for this adoring and all-possessing
consciousness of the rich and complete divine life over against the
self’s life, and of the possible achievement of a level of being, a
sublimation of the self, wherein we are perfectly united with it, may
fairly be written down as a necessary element of all mystical life. This
is the common factor which unites those apparently incompatible views of
the Universe which have been claimed at one time or another as mystical.
Their mystical quality abides wholly in the temper of the self who
adopts them. He may be a transcendentalist; but if so, it is because his
intuition of the divine is so lofty that it cannot be expressed by means
of any intellectual concept, and he is bound to say with Ruysbroeck, “He
is neither This nor That.” He may be a unanimist; but if he is, it is
because he finds in other men—more, in the whole web of life—that
mysterious living essence which is a mode of God’s existence, and which
he loves, seeks and recognizes everywhere. “How shall I find words for
the beauty of my Beloved? For He is merged in all beauty,” says Kabir,
“His colour is in all the pictures of the world, and it bewitches the
body and the mind.” He may be—often is—a sacramentalist; but if so, only
because the symbol or the sacrament help him to touch God. So St.
Thomas:

                     “Adoro te devote, latens Deitas,
                     Quæ sub his figuris vere latitas.”

The moment the mystic suspects that any of these things are obstacles
instead of means, he rejects them; to the scandal of those who
habitually confuse the image with the reality.

Thus we get the temperamental symbolist, quietist, nature-mystic, or
transcendentalist. We get Plotinus rapt to the “bare pure One”; St.
Augustine’s impassioned communion with Perfect Beauty; Eckhart declaring
his achievement of the “wilderness of God”; Jacopone da Todi prostrate
in adoration before the “Love that gives all things form”; Ruysbroeck
describing his achievement of “that wayless abyss of fathomless
beatitude where the Trinity of divine persons possess their nature in
the essential Unity;” Jacob Boehme gazing into the fire-world and there
finding the living heart of the Universe; Kabir listening to the
rhythmic music of Reality, and seeing the worlds told like beads within
the Being of God. And at the opposite pole we find Mechthild of
Madgeburg’s amorous conversations with her “heavenly Bridegroom,” the
many mystical experiences connected with the Eucharist, the Sūfi’s
enraptured description of God as the “Matchless Chalice and the
Sovereign Wine,” the narrow intensity and emotional raptures of
contemplatives of the type of Richard Rolle. We cannot refuse the title
of mystic to any of these; because in every case their aim is union
between God and the soul. This is the one essential of mysticism, and
there are as many ways from one term to the other as there are
variations in the spirit of man. But, on the other hand, when anybody
speaking of mysticism proposes an object that is less than God—increase
of knowledge, of health, of happiness, occultism, intercourse with
spirits, supernormal experience in general—then we may begin to suspect
that we are off the track.

Now we come to the next group of essentials: the necessary acts and
dispositions of the mystic himself, the development which takes place in
him—the psychological facts, that is to say, which are represented by
the so-called “mystic way.” The mystic way is best understood as a
process of sublimation, which carries the correspondences of the self
with the Universe up to higher levels than those on which our normal
consciousness works. Just as the normal consciousness stands over
against the unconscious, which, with its buried impulses and its
primitive and infantile cravings, represents a cruder reaction of the
organism to the external world; so does the developed mystical life
stand over against normal consciousness, with its preoccupations and its
web of illusions encouraging the animal will-to-dominate and animal
will-to-live. Normal consciousness sorts out some elements from the mass
of experiences beating at our doors and constructs from them a certain
order; but this order lacks any deep meaning or true cohesion, because
normal consciousness is incapable of apprehending the underlying reality
from which these scattered experiences proceed. The claim of the
mystical consciousness is to a closer reading of truth; to an
apprehension of the divine unifying principle behind appearance. “The
One,” says Plotinus, “is present everywhere and absent only from those
unable to perceive it”; and when we _do_ perceive it we “have another
life ... attaining the aim of our existence, and our rest.” To know this
at first hand—not to guess, believe or accept, but to be certain—is the
highest achievement of human consciousness, and the ultimate object of
mysticism. How is it done?

There are two ways of attacking this problem which may conceivably help
us. The first consists in a comparison of the declarations of different
mystics, and a sorting out of those elements which they have in common:
a careful watch being kept, of course, for the results of conscious or
unconscious imitation, of tradition and of theological preconceptions.
In this way we get some first-hand evidence of factors which are at any
rate usually present, and may possibly be essential. The second line of
enquiry consists in a re-translation into psychological terms of these
mystical declarations; when many will reveal the relation in which they
stand to the psychic life of man.

Reviewing the first-hand declarations of the mystics, we inevitably
notice one prominent feature: the frequency with which they break up
their experience into three phases. Sometimes they regard these
objectively, and speak of three worlds or three aspects of God of which
they become successively aware. Sometimes they regard them subjectively,
and speak of three stages of growth through which they pass, such as
those of Beginner, Proficient, and Perfect; or of phases of spiritual
progress in which we first meditate upon reality, then contemplate
reality, and at last are united with reality. But among the most widely
separated mystics of the East and West this threefold experience can
nearly always be traced. There are, of course, obvious dangers in
attaching absolute value to number-schemes of this kind. Numbers have an
uncanny power over the human mind; once let a symbolic character be
attributed to them, and the temptation to make them fit the facts at all
costs becomes overwhelming. We all know that the number “three” has a
long religious history, and are therefore inclined to look with
suspicion on its claim to interpret the mystic life. At the same time
there are other significant numbers—such as “seven” and “ten”—which have
never gained equal currency as the bases of mystical formulæ. We may
agree that the mediæval mystics found the threefold division of
spiritual experience in Neoplatonism; but we must also agree that a
formula of this kind is not likely to survive for nearly 2000 years
unless it agrees with the facts. Those who use it with the greatest
conviction are not theorists. They are the practical mystics, who are
intent on making maps of the regions into which they have penetrated.

Moreover, this is no mere question of handing on one single tradition.
The mystics describe their movement from appearance to reality in many
different ways, and use many incompatible religious symbols. The one
constant factor is the discrimination of three phases of consciousness,
no more, no less, in which we can recognize certain common
characteristics. “There are,” says Philo, “three kinds of life: life as
it concerns God, life as it concerns the creature, and a third
intermediate life, a mixture of the former two.” Consistently with this,
Plotinus speaks of three descending phases or principles of Divine
Reality: the Godhead, or absolute and unconditioned One; its
manifestation as _Nous_, the Divine Mind or Spirit which inspires the
“intelligible” and eternal world; and _Psyche_, the Life or Soul of the
physical Universe. Man, normally in correspondence with this physical
world of succession and change, may by spiritual intuition achieve first
consciousness of the eternal world of spiritual values, in which indeed
the apex of his soul already dwells; and in brief moments of ecstatic
vision may rise above this to communion with its source, the Absolute
One. There you have the mystic’s vision of the Universe, and the
mystic’s way of purification, enlightenment and ecstasy, bringing new
and deeper knowledge of reality as the self’s interest, urged by its
loving desire of the Ultimate, is shifted from sense to soul, from soul
to spirit. There is here no harsh dualism, no turning from a bad
material world to a good spiritual world. We are invited to one gradual
undivided process of sublimation, penetrating ever more deeply into the
reality of the Universe, to find at last “that One who is present
everywhere and absent only from those who do not perceive Him.” What we
behold, that we are: citizens, according to our own will and desire, of
the surface world of the senses, the deeper world of life, or the
ultimate world of Spiritual reality.

An almost identical doctrine appears in the Upanishads. At the heart of
reality is Brahma, “other than the known, and above the unknown.” His
manifestation is Ananda, that spiritual world which is the true object
of æsthetic passion and religious contemplation. From its life and
consciousness are born, in it they have their being, to it they must
return. Finally, there is the world-process as we know it, which
represents Ananda taking form. So too the mystic Kabir, who represents
an opposition to the Vedantic philosophy, says: “From beyond the
Infinite the Infinite comes, and from the Infinite the finite extends.”
And again: “Some contemplate the formless and others meditate on form,
but the wise man knows that Brahma is beyond both.” Here we have the
finite world of becoming, the infinite world of being, and Brahma, the
Unconditioned Absolute, exceeding and including all. Yet, as Kabir
distinctly declares again and again, there are no fences between these
aspects of the Universe. When we come to the root of reality we find
that “Conditioned and Unconditioned are but one word”; the difference is
in our own degree of awareness.

Compare with this three of the great mediæval Catholic mystics: that
acute psychologist Richard of St. Victor, the ardent poet and
contemplative Jacopone da Todi, and the profound Ruysbroeck. Richard of
St. Victor says that there are three phases in the contemplative
consciousness. The first is called dilation of mind, enlarging and
deepening our vision of the world. The next is elevation of mind, in
which we behold the realities which are above ourselves. The third is
ecstasy, in which the mind is carried up to contact with truth in its
pure simplicity. This is really the universe of Plotinus translated into
subjective terms. So, too, Jacopone da Todi says in the symbolism of his
day that three heavens are open to man. He must climb from one to the
other; it is hard work, but love and longing press him on. First, when
the mind has achieved self-conquest, the “starry heaven” of multiplicity
is revealed to it. Its darkness is lit by scattered lights; points of
reality pierce the sky. Next, it achieves the “crystalline heaven” of
lucid contemplation, where the soul is conformed to the rhythm of the
divine life, and by its loving intuition apprehends God under veils.
Lastly, in ecstasy it may be lifted to that ineffable state which he
calls the “hidden heaven,” where it enjoys a vision of imageless reality
and “enters into possession of all that is God.” Ruysbroeck says that he
has experienced three orders of reality: the natural world, theatre of
our moral struggle; the essential world, where God and Eternity are
indeed known, but by intermediaries; and the super-essential world,
where without intermediary, and beyond all separation, “above reason and
without reason,” the soul is united to “the glorious and absolute One.”

Take, again, a totally different mystic, Jacob Boehme. He says that he
saw in the Divine Essence three principles or aspects. The first he
calls “the deepest Deity, without and beyond Nature,” and the next its
manifestation in the Eternal Light-world. The third is that outer world
in which we dwell according to the body, which is a manifestation, image
or similitude of the Eternal. “And we are thus,” he says, “to understand
reality as a threefold being, or three worlds _in one another_.” We
observe again the absence of water-tight compartments. The whole of
reality is present in every part of it; and the power of correspondence
with all these aspects of it is latent in man. “If one sees a right
man,” says Boehme again, “he may say, I see here three worlds standing.”

We have now to distinguish the essential element in all this. How does
it correspond with psychological facts? Some mystics, like Richard of
St. Victor, have frankly exhibited its subjective side and so helped us
to translate the statements of their fellows. Thus Dionysius the
Areopagite says in a celebrated passage: “Threefold is the way to God.
The first is the way of purification, in which the mind is inclined to
learn true wisdom. The second is the way of illumination, in which the
mind by contemplation is kindled to the burning of love. The third is
the way of union, in which the mind by understanding, reason and spirit
is led up by God alone.” This formula restates the Plotinian law; for
the “contemplation” of Dionysius is the “spiritual intuition” of
Plotinus, which inducts man into the intelligible world; his “union” is
the Plotinian ecstatic vision of the One. It profoundly impressed the
later Christian mystics, and has long been accepted as the classic
description of spiritual growth, because it has been found again and
again to answer to experience. It is therefore worth our while to
examine it with some care.

First we notice how gentle, gradual and natural is the process of
sublimation that Dionysius demands of us. According to him, the mystic
life is a life centred on reality: the life that first seeks reality
without flinching, then loves and adores the reality perceived, and at
last, wholly surrendered to it, is “led by God alone.” First, the self
is “inclined to learn _true_ wisdom.” It awakes to new needs, is cured
of its belief in sham values, and distinguishes between real and unreal
objects of desire. That craving for more life and more love which lies
at the very heart of our selfhood, here slips from the charmed circle of
the senses into a wider air. When this happens abruptly it is called
“conversion”; and may then have the character of a psychic convulsion
and be accompanied by various secondary psychological phenomena. But
often it comes without observation. Here the essentials are a desire and
a disillusionment sufficiently strong to overcome our natural sloth, our
primitive horror of change. “The first beginning of all things is a
craving,” says Boehme; “we are creatures of will and desire.” The divine
discontent, the hunger for reality, the unwillingness to be satisfied
with the purely animal or the purely social level of consciousness, is
the first essential stage in the development of the mystical
consciousness.

So the self is either suddenly or gradually inclined to “true wisdom”;
and this change of angle affects the whole character, not only or indeed
specially the intellectual outlook, but the ethical outlook too. This is
the meaning of “purgation.” False ways of feeling and thinking,
established complexes which have acquired for us an almost sacred
character, and governed though we knew it not all our reactions to
life—these must be broken up. That mental and moral sloth which keeps us
so comfortably wrapped in unrealities must go. This phase in the
mystic’s growth has been specially emphasized and worked out by the
Christian mystics, who have made considerable additions to the
philosophy and natural history of the soul. The Christian sense of sin
and conception of charity, the Christian notion of humility as a finding
of our true level, an exchanging of the unreal standards of egoism for
the disconcerting realities of life seen from the angle of Eternity; the
steadfast refusal to tolerate any claim to spirituality which is not
solidly based on moral values, or which is divorced from the spirit of
tenderness and love—all this has immensely enriched the mysticism of the
West, and filled up some of the gaps left by Neoplatonism. It is
characteristic of Christianity that, addressing itself to all men—not,
as Neoplatonism tended to do, to the superior person—and offering to all
men participation in Eternal Life, it takes human nature as it is; and
works from the bottom up, instead of beginning at a level which only a
few of the race attain. Christianity perceived how deeply normal men are
enslaved by the unconscious; how great a moral struggle is needed for
their emancipation. Hence it concentrated on the first stage of
purgation, and gave it new meaning and depth. The monastic rule of
poverty, chastity and obedience—and we must remember that the original
aim of monasticism was to provide a setting in which the mystical life
could be lived—aims at the removal of those self-centred desires and
attachments which chain consciousness to a personal instead of a
universal life. He who no longer craves for personal possessions,
pleasures or powers, is very near to perfect liberty. His attention is
freed from its usual concentration on the self’s immediate interests,
and at once he sees the Universe in a new, more valid, because
disinterested light.

                         “Povertate è nulla avere
                         e nulla cosa poi volere
                         ed omne cosa possedere
                         en spirito de libertade.”

Yet this positive moral purity which Christians declared necessary to
the spiritual life was not centred on a lofty aloofness from human
failings, but on a self-giving and disinterested love, the complete
abolition of egoism. This alone, it declared, could get rid of that
inward disharmony—one aspect of the universal conflict between the
instinctive and the rational life—which Boehme called the “powerful
contrarium” warring with the soul.

Now this “perfect charity in life surrendered,” however attained, is an
essential character of the true mystic; without it, contemplation is an
impossibility or a sham. But when we come to the means by which it is to
be attained, we re-enter the region of controversy; for here we are at
once confronted by the problem of asceticism, and its connection with
mysticism—perhaps the largest and most difficult of the questions now
facing those who are concerned with the re-statement of the laws of the
spiritual life. Originally regarded as a gymnastic of the soul, an
education in those manly virtues of self-denial and endurance without
which the spiritual life is merely an exquisite form of hedonism,
asceticism was identified by Christian thought with the idea of
mortification; the killing out of all those impulses which deflect the
soul from the straight path to God. For the true mystic, it is never
more than a means to an end; and is often thrown aside when that end is
attained. Its necessity is therefore a purely practical question.
Fasting and watching may help one to dominate unruly instincts, and so
attain a sharper and purer concentration on God; but make another so
hungry and sleepy that he can think of nothing else. Thus Jacopone da
Todi said of his own early austerities that they resulted chiefly in
indigestion, insomnia and colds in the head; whilst John Wesley found in
fasting a positive spiritual good. Some ascetic practices again are
almost certainly disguised indulgences of those very cravings which they
are supposed to kill, but in fact merely repress. Others—such as hair
shirts, chains, and so forth—depended for their meaning on a mediæval
view of the body and of the virtues of physical pain which is
practically extinct, and now seems to most of us utterly artificial. No
one will deny that austerity is better than luxury for the spiritual
life; but perfect detachment of the will and senses can be achieved
without resort to merely physical expedients by those living normally in
the world, and this is the essential thing.

The true asceticism is a gymnastic not of the body, but of the mind. It
involves training in the art of recollection; the concentration of
thought, will, and love upon the eternal realities which we commonly
ignore. The embryo contemplative, if his spiritual vision is indeed to
be enlarged, and his mind kindled, as Dionysius says, to “the burning of
love,” must acquire and keep a special state of inward poise, an
attitude of attention, which is best described as “the state of prayer”;
that same condition which George Fox called “keeping in the Universal
Spirit.” If we do not attend to reality, we are not likely to perceive
it. The readjustments which shall make this attention natural and
habitual are a phase in man’s inward conflict for the redemption of
consciousness from its lower and partial attachments. This conflict is
no dream. It means hard work; mental and moral discipline of the
sternest kind. The downward drag is incessant, and can be combated only
by those who are clearly aware of it, and are willing to sacrifice lower
interests and joys to the demands of the spiritual life. In this sense
mortification is an integral part of the “purgative way.” Unless the
self’s “inclination to true wisdom” is strong enough to inspire these
costing and heroic efforts, its spiritual cravings do not deserve the
name of mysticism.

These, then, seem essential factors in the readjustment which the
mystics call purgation. We go on to their next stage, the so-called “way
of illumination.” Here, says Dionysius, the mind is kindled by
contemplation to the burning of love. There is a mental and an emotional
enhancement, whereby the self apprehends the reality it has sought;
whether under the veils of religion, philosophy, or nature-mysticism.
Many mystics have made clear statements about this phase in human
transcendence. Thus the Upanishads invite us to “know everything in the
Universe as enveloped in God.” “When the purified seeker,” says Plato,
“comes to the end, he will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous
beauty.... Beauty absolute, separate, simple and everlasting.” His
follower Plotinus says that by spiritual intuition man, “wrought into
harmony with the Supreme,” enters into communion with _Nous_, the
“intelligible world” of eternal realities—that splendour yonder which is
his home: and further that this light, shining upon the soul, enlightens
it, makes it a member of the spiritual order, and so “transforms the
furnace of this world into a garden of flowers.” Ruysbroeck declares
that this eternal world “is not God, but it is the light in which we see
Him.” Jacopone da Todi says that the self, achieving the crystalline
heaven, “feels itself to be a part of all things,” because it has
annihilated its separate will and is conformed to the movement of the
Divine Life. Kabir says: “The middle region of the sky, wherein the
Spirit dwelleth, is radiant with the music of light.” Boehme calls it
the “light-world proceeding from the fire-world”; and says it is the
origin of that outward world in which we dwell. “This light,” he says,
“shines through and through all, but is only apprehended by that which
unites itself thereto.” It seems to me fairly clear that these, and many
other descriptions I cannot now quote, refer to an identical state of
consciousness, which might be called an experience of Eternity, but not
of the Eternal One. I say “an experience,” not merely a mental
perception. Contemplation, which is the traditional name for that
concentrated attention in which this phase of reality is revealed, is an
activity of all our powers: the heart, the will, the mind. Dionysius
emphasizes the ardent love which this revelation of reality calls forth,
and which is indeed a condition of our apprehension of it; for the cold
gaze of the metaphysician cannot attain it, unless he be a lover and a
mystic too. “By love He may be gotten and holden, by thought never,”
says the author of _The Cloud of Unknowing_. It is only through the mood
of humble and loving receptivity in which the artist perceives beauty,
that the human spirit can apprehend a reality which is greater than
itself. The many declarations about noughting, poverty and “holy
nothingness” refer to this. The meek and poor of spirit really are the
inheritors of Eternity.

So we may place the attitude of selfless adoration, the single-hearted
passion of the soul, among the essentials of the mystic in the
illuminated way. A very wide range of mystical experiences must be
attributed to this second stage in man’s spiritual growth. Some at least
of its secrets are known to all who are capable of æsthetic passion;
who, in the presence of beauty, know themselves to stand upon the fringe
of another plane of being, where the elements of common life are given
new colour and value, and its apparent disharmonies are resolved. So,
too, that deep sense of a divine companionship which many ardent souls
achieve in prayer is a true if transitory experience of illumination. We
shall probably be right in assuming that the enormous majority of
mystics never get beyond this level of consciousness. Certainly a large
number of religious writers on mysticism attribute to its higher and
more personal manifestations the names of “divine union” and “unitive
life”; thereby adding to the difficulty of classifying spiritual states,
and showing themselves unaware of the great distinction which such
full-grown mystics as Plotinus, Jacopone da Todi or Ruysbroeck describe
as existing between this “middle heaven” and the ecstatic vision of the
One which alone really satisfies their thirst for truth. Thus Jacopone
at first uses the strongest unitive language to describe that rapturous
and emotional intercourse with Divine Love which characterized his
middle period; but when he at last achieves the vision of the Absolute,
he confesses that he was in error in supposing that it was indeed the
Truth Whom he thus saw and worshipped under veils.

                          “Or, parme, fo fallanza,
                          non se’ quel che credea,
                          tenendo non avea
                          vertá senza errore.”

Thus Ruysbroeck attributes to the contemplative life, “the inward and
upward-going ways by which one may pass into the Presence of God,” but
distinguishes these from that super-essential life wherein “we are
swallowed up, beyond reason and above reason, in the deep quiet of the
Godhead which is never moved.”

All the personal raptures of devotional mysticism, all the
nature-mystic’s joyous consciousness of God in creation, Blake’s “world
of imagination and vision,” the “coloured land” of Æ., the Sūfi’s
“tavern on the way,” where he is refreshed by a draught of supersensual
wine, belong to the way of illumination. For the Christian mystic the
world into which it inducts him is, pre-eminently, the sphere of the
divine Logos-Christ, fount of creation and source of all beauty; the
hidden Steersman who guides and upholds the phenomenal world:

                 “Splendor che dona a tutto ’l mondo luce,
                 amor, Iesú, de li angeli belleza,
                 cielo e terra per te si conduce
                 e splende in tutte cose tua fattezza.”

Here the reality behind appearance is still mediated to the mystic under
symbols and forms. The variation of these symbols is great; his adoring
gaze now finds new life and significance in the appearances of nature,
the creations of music and of art, the imagery of religion and
philosophy, and reality speaks to him through his own credal
conceptions. But absolute value cannot be attributed to any of these,
even the most sacred: they change, yet the experience remains. Thus an
identical consciousness of close communion with God is obtained by the
non-sacramental Quaker in his silence and by the sacramental Catholic in
the Eucharist. The Christian contemplative’s sense of personal
intercourse with the divine as manifest in the incarnate Christ is hard
to distinguish from that of the Hindu Vaishnavite, when we have allowed
for the different constituents of his apperceiving mass:

             “Dark, dark the far Unknown and closed the way
             To thought and speech; silent the Scriptures; yea,
             No word the Vedas say.

             “Not thus the Manifest. How fair! how near!
             Gone is our thirst if only He appear—
             He, to the heart so dear.”

So, too, the Sūfi mystic who has learned to say: “I never saw anything
without seeing God therein;” Kabir exclaiming: “I have stilled my
restless mind, and my heart is radiant; for in Thatness I have seen
beyond Thatness, in company I have seen the Comrade Himself;” the
Neoplatonist rapt in contemplation of the intelligible world “yonder”;
Brother Lawrence doing his cooking in the presence of God, reveal under
analysis an identical type of consciousness. This consciousness is the
essential; the symbols under which the self apprehends it are not.

Among these symbols we must reckon a large number of the secondary
phenomena of mysticism: divine visions and voices, and other
dramatizations of the self’s apprehensions and desires. The best mystics
have always recognized the doubtful nature of these so-called divine
revelations and favours, and have tried again and again to set up tests
for discerning those which really “come from God”—_i. e._ mediate a
valid spiritual experience. Personally, I think very few of these
phenomena are mystical in the true sense. Just as our normal
consciousness is more or less at the mercy of invasions from the
unconscious region, of impulses which we fail to trace to their true
origin; so too the mystical consciousness is perpetually open to
invasion from the lower centres. These invasions are not always
understood by the mystic. Obvious examples are the erotic raptures of
the Sūfi poets, and the emotional, even amorous relations in which many
Christian ascetics believe themselves to stand to Christ or Our Lady.
The Holy Ghost saying to Angela of Foligno, “I love you better than any
other woman in the vale of Spoleto”; the human raptures of Mechthild of
Magdeburg with her Bridegroom; St. Bernard’s attitude to the Virgin; the
passionate love-songs of Jacopone da Todi; the mystical marriage of St.
Catherine of Siena; St. Teresa’s “wound of love”; these, and many
similar episodes, demand no supernatural explanation, and add nothing to
our knowledge of the work of the Spirit in man’s soul. So, too, the
infantile craving for a sheltering and protective love finds expression
over and over again in mystical literature, and satisfaction in the
states of consciousness which it has induced. The innate longing of the
self for more life, more love, an ever greater and fuller experience,
attains a complete realization in the lofty mystical state called union
with God. But failing this full achievement, the self is capable of
offering itself many disguised satisfactions; and among these disguised
satisfactions we must reckon at least the majority of “divine favours”
enjoyed by contemplatives of an emotional type. Whatever the essence of
mysticism may turn out to be, it is well to recognize these lapses to
lower levels as among the least fortunate of its accidents.

We come to the third stage, the true goal of mystic experience; the
intuitive contact with that ultimate reality which theologians mean by
the Godhead and philosophers by the Absolute, a contact in which, as
Richard of St. Victor says “the soul gazes upon Truth without any veils
of creatures—not in a mirror darkly, but in its pure simplicity.” The
claim to this is the loftiest claim which can be made by human
consciousness. There is little we can say of it, because there is little
we know; save that the vision or experience is always the vision or
experience of a Unity which reconciles all opposites, and fulfils all
man’s highest intuitions of reality. “Be lost altogether in Brahma like
an arrow that has completely penetrated its target,” say the Upanishads.
This self-loss, says Dionysius the Areopagite, is the Divine Initiation:
wherein we “pass beyond the topmost altitudes of the holy ascent, and
leave behind all divine illumination and voices and heavenly utterances;
and plunge into the darkness where truly dwells, as Scripture saith,
that One Which is beyond all things.” Some recent theologians have tried
to separate the conceptions of God and of the Absolute: but mystics
never do this, though some of the most clear-sighted, such as Meister
Eckhart, have separated that unconditioned Godhead known in ecstasy from
the personal God who is the object of devotional religion, and who
represents a humanization of reality. When the great mystic achieves the
“still, glorious, and absolute Oneness” which finally satisfies his
thirst for truth—the “point where all lines meet and show their
meaning”—he generally confesses how symbolic was the object of his
earlier devotion, how partial his supposed communion with the Divine.
Thus Jacopone da Todi—exact and orthodox Catholic though he was—when he
reached “the hidden heaven,” discovered and boldly declared the
approximate character of all his previous conceptions of, and communion
with God; the great extent to which subjective elements had entered into
his experience. In the great ode which celebrates his ecstatic vision of
Truth, when “ineffable love, imageless goodness, measureless light” at
last shone in his heart, he says: “I thought I knew Thee, tasted Thee,
saw Thee under image: believing I held Thee in Thy completeness I was
filled with delight and unmeasured love. But _now_ I see I was
mistaken—Thou art not as I thought and firmly held.” So Tauler says that
compared with the warm colour and multiplicity of devotional experience,
the very Godhead is a “rich nought,” a “bare pure ground”; and
Ruysbroeck that it is “an unwalled world,” “neither this nor that.”
“This fruition of God,” he says again, “is a still and glorious and
essential Oneness beyond the differentiation of the Persons, where there
is neither an outpouring nor an indrawing of God, but the Persons are
still and one in fruitful love, in calm and glorious unity.... There is
God our fruition and His own, in an eternal and fathomless bliss.”

“How, then, am I to love the Godhead?” says Eckhart. “Thou shalt love
Him as He is: not as a God, not as a Spirit, not as a Person, not as an
image, but as a sheer pure One. And in this One we are to sink from
nothing to nothing, so help us God.” “This consciousness of the One,”
says Plotinus, “comes not by knowledge, but by an actual Presence
superior to any knowing. To have it, the soul must rise above knowledge,
above all its wandering from its unity.” He goes on to explain that all
partial objects of love and contemplation, even Beauty and Goodness
themselves, are lower than this, springing from the One as light from
the sun. To see the disc, we must put on smoked glasses, shut off the
rays, and submit to the “radiant darkness” which enters so frequently
into mystical descriptions of the Absolute.

It is an interesting question whether this consummation of the mystic
way need involve that suppression of the surface-consciousness which is
called ecstasy. The majority of mystics think that it must; and probably
it is almost inevitable that so great a concentration and so lofty an
intuition should for the time it lasts drive all other forms of
awareness from the field. Even simple contemplation cannot be achieved
without some deliberate stilling of the senses, a deliberate focusing of
our vagrant attention, and abolishes self-consciousness while it lasts.
This is the way that our mental machinery works; but this should not
make us regard trance-states as any part of the essence of mysticism.
The ecstatic condition is no guarantee of mystic vision. It is
frequently pathological, and is often found along with other abnormal
conditions in emotional visionaries whose revelations have no ultimate
characteristics. It is, however, just as uncritical to assume that
ecstasy is necessarily a pathological symptom, as it is to assume that
it is necessarily a mystic state. We have a test which we can apply to
the ecstatic; and which separates the results of nervous disorder from
those of spiritual transcendence. “What fruit dost thou bring back from
this thy vision?” is the final question which Jacopone da Todi addresses
to the mystic’s soul. And the answer is: “An ordered life in every
state.” The true mystic in his ecstasy has seen, however obscurely, the
key of the Universe: “la forma universal di questo nodo.” Hence he has a
clue by which to live. Reality has become real to him; and there are no
others of whom we can fully say that. So, ordered correspondence with
each level of existence, physical and spiritual, successive and
eternal—a practical realization of the proportions of life—is the
guarantee of the genuine character of that sublimation of consciousness
which is called the mystic way; and this distinguishes it from the
fantasies of psychic illness or the disguised self-indulgences of the
dream-world. The real mystic is not a selfish visionary. He grows in
vigour as he draws nearer and nearer the sources of true life, and his
goal is only reached when he participates in the creative energies of
the Divine Nature. The perfect man, says the Sūfi, must not only die
into God in ecstasy (_fana_), but abide in and with Him (_baqa_),
manifesting His truth in the world of time. He is called to a life more
active, because more contemplative, than that of other men: to fulfil
the monastic ideal of a balanced career of work and prayer. “Then only
is our life a _whole_,” says Ruysbroeck, “when contemplation and work
dwell in us side by side, and we are perfectly in both of them at once.”

Plotinus speaks in the same sense under another image in one of his most
celebrated passages: “We always move round the One, but we do not always
fix our gaze upon It. We are like a choir of singers standing round the
conductor, who do not always sing in time, because their attention is
diverted to some external object. When they look at the conductor, they
sing well and are really with him. So we always move round the One. If
we did not, we should dissolve and cease to exist. But we do not always
look towards the One. When we do, we attain the end of our existence and
our rest; and we no longer sing out of tune, but form in truth a divine
choir about the One.” In this conception of man’s privilege and duty we
have the indestructible essence of mysticism.




                   THE MYSTIC AND THE CORPORATE LIFE


One of the commonest of the criticisms which are brought against the
mystics is that they represent an unsocial type of religion; that their
spiritual enthusiasms are personal and individual, and that they do not
share or value the corporate life and institutions of the church or
community to which they belong. Yet, as a matter of fact, the relation
that does and should exist between personal religion and the corporate
life of the church frequently appears in them in a peculiarly intense, a
peculiarly interesting form; and in their lives, perhaps, more easily
than elsewhere, we may discern the principles which do or should govern
the relation of the individual to the community.

In the true mystic, who is so often and so wrongly called a “religious
individualist,” we see personal religion raised to its highest power. If
we accept his experience as genuine, it involves an intercourse with the
spiritual world, an awareness of it, which transcends the normal
experience, and appears to be independent of the general religious
consciousness of the community to which he belongs. The mystic speaks
with God as a person with a Person, and not as a member of a group. He
lives by an immediate knowledge far more than by belief; by a knowledge
achieved in those hours of direct, unmediated intercourse with the
Transcendent when, as he says, he was “in union with God.” The certitude
then gained—a certitude which he cannot impart, and which is not
generally diffused—governs all his reactions to the Universe. It even
persists and upholds him in those terrible hours of darkness when all
his sense of spiritual reality is taken away.

Such a personality as this seems at first sight to stand in little need
of the support which the smaller nature, the more languid religious
consciousness, receives from the corporate spirit. By the very term
“mystic” we indicate a certain aloofness from the crowd, suggest that he
is in possession of a secret which the community as a whole does not and
cannot share; that he lives at levels to which they cannot rise. I think
that much of the distrust with which he is often regarded comes from
this sense of his independence of the herd; his apparent separation from
the often clumsy and always symbolic methods of institutional religion,
and the further fact that his own methods and results cannot be
criticized or checked by those who have not shared them. “I spake as I
saw,” said David; and those who did not see can only preserve a
respectful or an exasperated silence.

Yet this common opinion that the mystic is a lonely soul wholly absorbed
in his vertical relation with God, that his form of religious life
represents an opposition to, and an implicit criticism of, the corporate
and institutional form of religious life; this is decisively
contradicted by history; which shows us, again and again, the great
mystics as the loyal children of the great religious institutions, and
forces us to admit that here as in other departments of human activity
the corporate and the individual life are intimately plaited together.
Even those who have broken away from the churches that reared them, have
quickly drawn to themselves disciples, and become the centres of new
groups. Surely, therefore, it is worth while to examine, if we can, the
nature of the connection between these two factors: to ask, on the one
hand, what it is that the corporate life and the group-consciousness
which it develops give the mystic; on the other, what is the real value
of the mystic to the corporate life of his church?

As to the first question: What is it that the corporate life does for
the great spiritual genius?—for I think that we may allow the great
mystic to be that. First, and most obviously, it gives him a favourable
environment. He must have an environment: he must be affected by it.
That is a certainty in the case of any living thing; a certainty so
obvious that it would hardly be worth stating were it not that those who
talk about the mystic craving for solitude—his complete aloofness from
human life—seem often to ignore it. The idea of solitude in any complete
sense is, of course, an illusion. We are bound, if we live at all, to
accept the fact of a living world outside ourselves, to have social
relations with something; and it only remains to decide what these
relations shall be. The _yogi_ or the hermit who retreats to the forest
in order to concentrate his mind more utterly upon the quest of God,
only exchanges the society of human beings for the society of other
living things. Did he eliminate all else, the parasites of his own body,
the bacterial populations of his alimentary system, would be there to
remind him that man cannot live alone. He may shift his position in the
web of life, but its strands will enmesh him still. So, too, the monk or
nun “buried alive” in the cloister is still living a family life; only
it is a family life that is governed by special ideals.

Now it is plainly better for the mystic, whose aim is the establishment
of special relations with the spiritual order, that the social
consciousness in which he is immersed, and from which he is taking
colour all the time, should have a spiritual and religious tendency;
that the social acts in which he takes part should harmonize rather than
conflict with his own deep intuition of reality. The difference in
degree between that deep intuition and the outward corporate acts—the
cult—which he thus shares, may be enormous: for the cult is an
expression of the crowd consciousness, and manifests its spiritual
crudity, its innate conservatism, its primitive demands for safety and
personal rewards. The inadequacy or unreality of the forms, the low
level of the adoration which they evoke, may distress and even disgust
him. Yet, even so, it is better for him that he should be within a
church than outside it. Compared with this one fact—that he is a member
of a social group which recognizes spiritual values, and therefore lives
in an environment permeated by religious concepts—the accuracy in detail
of the creed which that group professes, the adequacy of its liturgical
acts, is unimportant.

Next, the demands made and restrictions imposed by the community on the
individual are good for the mystic. Man is social right through; in
spirit as well as in body and mind. His most sublime spiritual
experiences are themselves social in type. Intercourse of a person with
a Person, the merging of his narrow consciousness in a larger
consciousness, the achievement of a divine sonship, a spiritual
marriage: these are the highest things that he can say concerning his
achievement of Divine Reality. And they all entail, not a narrow
self-realization, but the breaking-down of barriers; the setting-up of
wider relationships. It follows that self-mergence in the common life is
an education for that self-mergence in the absolute life at which the
mystic aims. Such self-mergence, and the training in humility,
self-denial, obedience, suppleness, which is involved in it, is held by
all ascetic teachers to be essential to the education of the human soul.
Union with, and to a certain extent submission to, the church, to the
family—to life, in fact—an attitude of self-giving surrender: this is
the best of preparations for that total self-naughting of the soul which
is involved in union with God; that utter doing-away of the I, the Me,
and the Mine, till it becomes one will and one love with the divine will
and love.

On these two counts alone—harmonious environment and salutary
discipline—we shall expect, other things being equal, that the richest
and most fruitful types of mystical experience will arise within
religious institutions rather than outside them; and as a matter of fact
this is what we do find. The Hindu ascetic has his recognized place in
the Hindu system. He has but reached the summit of a pyramid which is
firmly based on earth. The Sūfi is a good Moslem, and commonly the
member of a religious confraternity which imposes a strict rule of life.
The Christian mystic, too, grows up from the Christian society. His
roots strike deep down into that favouring soil. Though his branches may
shoot up to the heavens, and seem to draw thence all the light and heat
by which he lives, yet he is really fed from below as well as from
above. When he refuses to acknowledge this principle, when he abjures
the discipline, the authority, the support of the corporate life, and
regards himself as a separate individual, dependent on direct
inspiration alone; how quickly he becomes unbalanced and eccentric, how
difficult it is for him to avoid the disease of spiritual megalomania.
Refusing the support and discipline of organized religion, he becomes
like a poet who refuses to be controlled by the laws of prosody; which
seem to limit, but really strengthen and beautify, his work.

It is true that right through the history of Christian mysticism there
has been a line of insurgent mystics who have made this refusal; whose
direct vision of spiritual perfection has brought with it so
overwhelming a sense of the imperfection, formalism, unreality, the
dreadfulness of religious institutions, that it has forced them into a
position of more or less acute revolt from the official church. So clear
has been their own consciousness of the spiritual world that the soul’s
life and growth, its actual and individual rebirth, have shone out for
them as the only things that matter. Hence the dramatization of these
things in ceremonial religion, the effort to give spiritual values a
concrete form, has seemed to them like a blasphemous parody. Unable to
harmonize the inward and the outward—the all-penetrating reality of
religion as they understand it, with its crude outward expression in the
external cult, where formal acts and intellectual assents so often seem
to take the place of inward changes—in the end they solve the problem by
repudiating the external and visible church. This rebel-type, victims of
exaggerated individualism, which would make the special experiences of a
few the standard for the whole race, has persisted side by side with the
law-abiding type; who have preserved, if not always a perfect balance
between liberty and obedience, at any rate a more reasonable proportion
between them. Often the corruption of the times in which he lived has
seemed to the mystic to make such rebellion inevitable. This is
particularly true in the case of George Fox, whose ragings were directed
far less against organized religion than against unreal religion; and
who might, had he lived in fourteenth-century Germany, have found a
congenial career as one of the Friends of God. Yet, even so, the careers
of these rebels have been on the whole unfruitful, compared with those
who remained within the institutional framework and effected their
reforms from inside. They seldom quite escape the taint of arrogance.
There is apt to be a touch of self-consciousness in their sanctity. We
have only to compare the influence exerted by the outstanding figures of
the two groups, to realize which type of spiritual life has had the best
and most enduring influence on the spiritual history of the race; which,
in fact, best stands the pragmatic test.

On the rebel side we have, of course, the leaders of many dead heresies
and sects. The Montanists of the second century, with their claim to
direct inspiration, their cult of ecstatic phenomena and prophetic
speech; the numerous mystical heretics and illuminati of the Middle
Ages, often preaching the most extravagant doctrines and always claiming
for them divine authority—for instance, the Brethren of the Free Spirit,
who claimed the possession of the Holy Ghost as an excuse not only for
theological, but also for moral aberrations. Later, there are the
Quietists, a particularly poisonous brand of unbalanced contemplatives;
and, contemporary with their revolt against Catholic forms and
authorities, innumerable mystical revolts against Protestant forms and
authorities, the very names of whose originators are now almost
forgotten. Amongst these two mighty figures stand up: Jacob Boehme and
George Fox. But we must remember as regards Boehme that, although he
certainly spoke with great violence against the error of confusing
external acceptance of religion with internal adherence to God,
“historical Christians” with “new men,” he never disowned the Lutheran
Church within which he was born. On the contrary, it was that church
which persecuted and finally disowned him. As to that great and strange
genius, George Fox, who aimed at nothing less than a world religion of a
mystical type, the free and conscious contact of every soul with the
Spirit of God, I believe that any unbiassed student of his Journal must
allow that, enormous as his achievement was, it might have been far
greater had his violent sense of vocation, his remarkable spiritual
gifts, been disciplined and controlled by the corporate consciousness as
expressed in institutional religion. Then some of the energy which he
expended in denunciations of steeple-houses might have been employed in
healing the disharmony between the visible and invisible church; helping
that vision of the Eternal by which he was possessed to find concrete
expression within traditional forms. Here, as elsewhere, the Inner Light
would have burned with a better and a truer flame had it submitted to
the limitations of a lamp.

I do not suggest that these people, even the most extravagant of them,
were not truly spiritual or truly mystical. The sort of criticism which
divides mystics into two groups—the orthodox, who are inspired by God,
and the heretical, who are inspired by Satan—of course belongs to the
dark ages of theology. On the contrary, these rebel-mystics most often
possessed—sometimes in a highly developed form—the sharp direct
consciousness of the Divine Life which is the essential quality of the
mystic. This was to them the central fact; by comparison with it they
judged all other things. What they did _not_ possess was the balancing,
equivalent consciousness of, and reverence for, corporate human life;
that group-personality which is the church, and its value and authority.
They lacked the sense that the whole organism, the whole herd, with all
its imperfections, is yet interdependent, and has got to move together,
urged from within by its more vivid spirits, not stung from without, as
if by some enthusiastic spiritual mosquito. To a greater or lesser
extent they failed in effect because they tried to be mystical in a
non-human instead of a human way; were “other-worldly” in the bad sense
of the word. They have not always remembered that Christ Himself, the
supreme pattern of all mystics, lived a balanced life of clear personal
vision, unmediated intercourse with God on the one hand, and gentle and
patient submission to the corporate consciousness on the other hand.
Though severely critical of the unrealities and hypocrisy of current
institutionalism, he yet sought to form the group, the “little flock,”
in which His ideas should be incorporated within, and not over against,
the official Jewish Church; and thus gradually to leaven the whole.

Put now against these vigorous individualists the names of the mystics
who have never felt that their passionate correspondences with the
Eternal Order—their clear vision of the adorable Perfection of God and
the imperfection, languor, and corruption of man—need involve a break
with the corporate religious life. Observe how these have continued for
centuries to be fruitful personalities, often not merely within their
own communion, but outside it too; how they have acted as salt, as
leaven, permeating and transmuting the general consciousness of the Body
of Christ. Often these, too, have been reformers—drastic, unrelenting
disturbers of the established order of things. St. Bernard, St.
Hildegarde, Mechthild, Jacopone da Todi, St. Catherine of Siena, Tauler,
were passionate in their denunciations of slackness, corruption, and
disorder. But they made their protests, and brought back the general
consciousness to a closer contact with reality, from within, and not
from without, the Christian church. Consider St. Bernard and Richard of
St. Victor, whose writings influenced for centuries the whole of the
religious literature of Europe; St. Hildegarde, St. Gertrude, Mechthild
of Magdeburg, great mystics, good churchwomen, but severe denouncers of
formalism and unreality; St. Francis of Assisi, who removed evangelical
poverty from the sphere of notion to the sphere of fact; St. Catherine
of Siena, who changed Italian politics; St. Joan of Arc, who altered
European history; the soaring transcendentalism of Ruysbroeck, who was
yet content to be a humble parish priest; the great mystical movement of
the Friends of God, ardent Catholics and ardent reformers too. Even our
own great mystical poets, Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert, Traherne,
Coventry Patmore and Francis Thompson, were one and all convinced
institutionalists. Finally, look at some of the great cloistered
mystics, of whom St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross are types; and see
how, though they seem in the eyes of the world to be “buried alive,”
they are and remain the ardent centres of a spreading light, which
perpetually stimulates and revivifies not only members of their own
order or communion, but spiritually sensitive souls outside.

Perhaps it is in those contemplatives who lived within and were obedient
to the rule of the great monastic orders, that we can see most easily
the nature of the link between the individual soul and the religious
group within which it does or should develop; the enormous value to it
of tradition, that huge accumulation of tendencies, ideals, systems,
wisdom both speculative and practical, which is preserved in the
corporate consciousness. Here the influence of the religious family, the
rule of life, the ideal held out, the severe education in self-control
administered to every novice, can always be traced; conditioning, and, I
believe, helping and bracing the character of that communion with the
Transcendent which the individual mystic enjoys. As the baby at birth
enters into a civilization prepared for him, and is at once supported,
educated, even clothed by a tradition prepared by countless generations
of the past; so the novice, whose spiritual childhood begins within a
great monastic family, receives—supposing, of course, that the order is
true to its ideals—the support and benefits of a tradition evolved
during previous generations in response to the needs of other similar
souls; and he is by so much the better off than he would be were he a
solitary, or a deliberate rebel who refuses to accept the heritage of
the past. He finds a life beautifully adjusted to his needs; yet which,
being greater and older than his own, keeps his rampant individualism in
check, nurtures and cultivates his growing spiritual consciousness, and
opposes—by its perpetual demands on humility, obedience, and
unselfishness—the vice of pride which the mystical individualist seldom
escapes. Such a mystical consciousness would not necessarily die without
the support of this corporate tradition, any more than the baby would
necessarily die did it emerge into the conditions of the paleolithic
cave instead of into those of the modern nursery. But in both cases the
environment would be unfavourable, and the effort required to attain
that position into which the child of tradition enters at birth would be
an enormous drain upon the powers of the organism.

The instinct of many mystics for a certain measure of solitude is no
contradiction of this. The hermits and the anchorites, even such rare
and extreme types as St. Anthony of Egypt, who is said to have lived in
perfect solitude for twenty years, did not withdraw from the Christian
society; nor did they disown the validity of its external and
institutional life. They sought to construct or find within the
Christian church an environment within which their special tendencies
could develop in a normal way; and this not merely for themselves, but
also for the sake of other souls. Such a period of withdrawal was felt
by them to be a necessary condition of their full effectiveness for
life. So, too, the poet or the artist must retreat from his fellows if
he is to commune with the eternal loveliness and interpret her to other
men: for a total concentration upon reality is the condition under which
it is revealed. The Catholic Church has always recognized, and does
still in the continued existence of the cloistered orders, the
reasonableness of this demand. We do not as a rule say bitter things
when a person of artistic or speculative genius leaves the family group
and goes to Paris or Oxford in order that his special powers may be
educated and become effective for life; nor should we feel resentment
because the mystical genius sometimes feels that the life of the home
circle, or even the normal life of the community, cannot give the
special training which he requires. In a few cases the mystics have felt
a long period of complete isolation to be necessary to them; but most
often they have been accessible to those who really needed them, and
helped these all the more because of the long periods of silence in
which they listened to the Voice of God, too often inaudible for them,
as for us, in the general bustle of the world. Their point of view has
been beautifully stated by a young French mystic, Elizabeth de la
Trinité, who died a few years ago. “I want,” she says, “to be all
silence, all adoration, that I may penetrate more and more deeply into
God; and become so full of Him that I can give Him in my prayers to
those poor souls still ignorant of His gift.” She wants to be a channel,
a duct, by which the love and power of God, of which she is so strongly
conscious, can flow out to other souls. It is not for herself that she
is working; it is for the world. Do we not find expressed there both the
individual longing and the corporate responsibility of the mystic? And
do we not touch here the intimate connection which should exist between
the separate life of the great mystic and the corporate life of the
church? On the one hand, the highly organized society, making it
possible for the contemplative to develop his special powers in a
harmonious environment and preventing the frittering of his energies; on
the other, that contemplative, like a special organ developed by the
Body of Christ, gaining for the whole community contacts and certitudes,
which it could not gain in any other way. News of God can only enter the
temporal order through some human consciousness. Is it unreasonable that
for so great an office certain individuals should be set apart—within
the community, not over against it—and should live in a special way?

As a matter of fact, the church has gained a thousandfold by her
acquiescence in the special vocation of the mystics; for the treasures
they won were never kept for themselves, but always showered upon her.
True, she has not hesitated to scrutinize and control them; sometimes
her attitude has seemed to the enthusiasts for liberty to be
deliberately obscurantist and tyrannical. Yet, even here—and although in
many cases there has clearly been ignorance, injustice, and
persecution—the mystic gains more than he loses by submission to the
collective judgment. Even in their harshest form, discipline and
tradition are still priceless for him. First, they school him in the
virtue of humility, the very foundation of the Christian character;
which is seldom possessed by the spiritual genius who always leads and
never submits, and whose triumphant formula, “God and myself!” too often
ends by becoming “Myself and God!”

              “O caritate, vita, ch’ ogn’ altro amor è morto;
              non vai rompendo legge; nante, l’observe tutto.”

said Jacopone da Todi; that natural rebel who deliberately submitted
himself to an uncongenial religious authority, and there found perfect
freedom.

Next, the solid sense of the community, the mere fact that it always
lags behind the more vivid spirits, that the forward-moving shepherd who
sees new pastures has got to take account of the slowest sheep—all this
is a valuable safeguard against the notorious extravagances of a
mysticism unfettered by authority. It is significant that the greatest
mystics in all communions have ever raised up their voices most
earnestly against spiritual license; have been most eager to submit
their soaring intuitions to the witness of their Scriptures or the
corporate feeling of their church. They realize the fact that they owe
to this church the huge debt which every individual owes to the
tradition of his art or of his trade. The church represents a complete
spiritual civilization, a conserver of values; were it not for her,
every new spiritual genius who arose would have to begin at the
beginning, at the Stone Age of the soul. Instead of that, he finds
himself placed within a social order enriched by all the contributions
of his great predecessors. The bridges are built; the roads are made and
named; his own experiences and discoveries are made more valid, less
terrifying, more comprehensible to him, because others have been this
way before. Compare the clarity, the sure-footedness as one may say, of
Ruysbroeck, of St. Catherine of Siena, of St. Teresa, with the
entanglements, the sense of wandering in beautiful but trackless places,
which one feels when reading even Boehme, Fox, or Blake; and others are
far less coherent than they. Man needs a convention, a tradition, a
limitation, if he is not to waste his creative powers; and this
convention the mystics find best and most easily in the forms of the
church to which they belong.

So we see that the corporate life of his church gives the mystic a good
deal. What does he, on his part, give to it?

Those who see in the mystic chiefly one who rebels against, or has no
use for, the corporate religious life, and acknowledges no authority but
that of his own spiritual intuitions, usually conceive of his
experiences as having value for himself alone. He cannot, they say,
communicate them or teach others to share them. Often, therefore, he is
spoken of as useless, selfish, other-worldly: a “lonely soul.” These
phrases suggest that those who use them have a very narrow view of
usefulness, a very materialistic view of the Body of Christ, and a very
unevangelical view of the relative positions of Mary and Martha. As a
matter of fact, the mystic, instead of being useless, selfish, and
other-worldly, is useful, unselfish, and this-worldly. He is a creative
personality, consecrated to the great practical business of actualizing
the eternal order within the temporal; and although the pursuit of this
business brings him hours of exquisite joy, it brings him hours of great
suffering too—suffering which is gladly and patiently endured. He does
it, or tries to do it, not because he seeks the joy, but solely for
love—love of God, love of his fellow-men—for he is perpetuating in a
certain sense the work of Christ, mediating between his brethren and
Divine Reality. Hence, where he is fully developed, he will, as
Ruysbroeck tells us, swing like a pendulum between contemplation and
action, between adoration of God and service of man. In him life has
evolved her most powerful spiritual engine; and she uses it not for the
next world, but for this world, for the eternalization of the here and
now, the making of it more real and more divine, more fully charged with
the grandeur of God. Often the mystic’s special work is done in a
positive and obvious fashion which should satisfy the most practical
mind, and which is yet wholly actuated by his central intention, that of
raising up—as he sometimes says—new children of the Eternal Goodness,
bringing back the corporate life to a closer contact with God. “My
little children, of whom I travail,” says St. Paul to his converts.
There is a typical mystic speaking of his life-work. Can we call St.
Francis of Assisi, the most devoted and original of missionaries; St.
Joan of Arc, re-making the consciousness of France by the most active of
methods; St. Catherine of Siena, purifying the Italian Church; St.
Teresa, regenerating the whole Carmelite Order, and leaving upon it a
stamp it has never lost; “lazy contemplatives”? Or St. Catherine of
Genoa, the devoted superintendent of a great hospital, who never
permitted her hours of ecstatic communion with God to interfere with her
duty to the sick?

Taken as a class, the Christian mystics are distinguished by nothing so
much as by their heroic and unselfish activities; by their varied and
innumerable services to the corporate life of the church. From their
ranks have come missionaries, preachers, prophets, social reformers,
poets, founders of institutions, servants of the poor and the sick,
patient guides and instructors of souls. We sometimes forget that even
those known chiefly by the writings they have left behind them have
sacrificed to the difficult task of reducing their transcendent
experience to words, hours in which—were the popular idea of the mystic
a true one—they might have been idly basking in the Divine Light. But
these practical activities, though often great, are only a part of the
mystic’s contribution to the corporate life. If his special claim to
communion with the Transcendent be true at all—and this argument is
based on the assumption that there is at least some truth in it—then he
does really tap a source of vitality higher than that with which other
men have contact. In the language of theology, he has not merely
“efficient” but also “extraordinary” grace; a larger dower of life,
directly dependent on his larger, more generous love. This is a claim to
which his strange triumphs over circumstance, his conquests over
ill-fortune, ill-health, oppositions and deprivations of every kind,
give weight. Not many strong and normal persons would willingly face, or
indeed endure, the hardships which St. Paul, St. Francis, St. Joan of
Arc, St. Teresa, gladly and successfully embraced.

This larger and intenser vitality the mystic does not and cannot keep to
himself. He infects with it all with whom he comes in contact, kindles
the latent fire in them: for the spiritual consciousness is caught, not
taught. Under his influence—sometimes from the mere encounter with his
personality—other men begin to live a more real, a more eternal life.
Ruysbroeck says that the Spirit of God, when it is truly received into a
soul, becomes a spreading light; and history confirms this. Corporate
experience of God always begins in a personal experience of God. The
rise of Christianity is the classic illustration of this truth; but
Hindu and Moslem religious history also declare it. Round each of the
great unitive mystics little groups of ardent disciples, of spiritual
children, have grown up. This is true both of those who remained within
and those who seceded from the official Church—for instance, St.
Bernard, Eckhart, St. Francis, Tauler, Ruysbroeck, St. Catherine of
Siena, St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Teresa, Boehme, Fox. Nor did their
influence cease with death.

Further, in reckoning up the value of the mystics to the church as a
whole, we sometimes forget the extent to which that church is indebted
to mystic intuition for the actual data upon which her corporate life is
based. Christianity, it is true, is fundamentally a historical religion;
but it is also a religion of experience, and its very history deals
quite as much with the events which attend human intercourse with the
Transcendent and Eternal as with concrete and visible happenings in
space and time. The New Testament is thick with reports of mystical
experiences. The Fourth Gospel and the Epistles of St. Paul depend for
their whole character on the soaring mystical genius their writers
possessed. Had St. Paul never been caught up to the third heaven, he
would have had a very different outlook on the world, and Christianity
would have been a different religion in consequence. Had the Fourth
Evangelist never known what it was to feel the sap of the Mystic Vine
flow through him, his words would have lacked their overwhelming
certitude. So, too, the liturgies bear the stamp of mystical feeling,
and most of the great religious concepts which the church has gradually
added to her store come from the same source. If we ask ourselves what
the history of the church would be without the history of her mystics,
then we begin to see how much of her light and colour emanates from
them; how much of her doctrine represents their experience translated
into dogmatic form. That communion with—that feeding on—the Divine Life
which she offers to every believer in the Eucharist is the central fact
of their existence. From Clement of Alexandria downwards, again and
again they appeal to Eucharistic images in order to express what it is
that really happens to the soul immersed in contemplative prayer. “I am
the food of the full-grown,” said the voice of God to St. Augustine.
“Every time we think with love of the Well-beloved, He is anew our meat
and drink,” says Ruysbroeck. So, too, the church’s language concerning
new birth, divine sonship, regeneration, union with Christ, and the
whole concept of grace, regarded as a transcendent life and love
perpetually pressing in on humanity—all this is of mystical origin, and
represents not the speculations but the concrete experience of the great
mystics. They are pushed out, as it were, by the visible church like
tentacles, to explore the unseen world which surrounds her, and drawn
back again to her bosom that they may impart to the whole body the more
abundant life which they have found. Were it not for the unfailing
family of the mystics, thus perpetually pushing out beyond the
protective edges of the organism, and bringing back official
Christianity into direct touch with the highest spiritual values, and so
constantly reaffirming the fact—by them felt and experienced—of the
intimate correspondence, the regenerating contact of God with the soul,
the church would long ago have fallen victim to that tendency to relapse
into the mechanical which dogs all organized groups. Then the resistance
which she has sometimes offered to the freshness and novelty, the
adventurous quality of the mystical impulse, where it has appeared
without preparation and sought to correct by its own overwhelming
certitude the spiritual conventions of the day, would have become that
hopeless inertia which is the precursor of death.

So we may best look upon the great Christian mystic as a special organ
developed within the Christian body for a special use. His peculiar
sensibilities, like those which condition artistic genius, are the gates
through which messages from the Transcendent come to man. He is finding
and feeling the Infinite; not for himself, but for us. His achievement,
bridging the gap which lies between the normal mind and the
supersensuous world, makes more valid and more actual to us the
assumptions upon which external religion is built; vindicating the
church’s highest claim, and hence the soul’s highest claim—the claim
that achievement of Eternal Life, communion with ultimate reality, is
possible to the spirit of man. More, since all human lives
interpenetrate, and isolation is impossible save in death, the more we,
the social group, are willing to accept the claim of the mystic, and
receive what he tells us in a spirit of humility instead of a spirit of
criticism; the more completely he will be able to share his treasure
with us, the more deeply we shall be able to enter into that
consciousness which he represents, which he brings in his own person
into the human scheme.

This, of course, the Christian church has said far more beautifully and
exactly in her doctrine of the Communion of Saints; and that doctrine,
rightly understood, is indeed the key to the connection between the
great mystics and the corporate life within which they arise. Were the
activities of these more vital spirits wholly hidden from us, wholly
silent and supersensual—as they are not—it would be a grossly
materialistic and violently un-Christian judgment which concluded from
this that their lives were useless save to themselves. How can a life
which aims at God be useless, if we believe that achievement of Him is
the final destiny and only satisfaction of every soul? It would be an
implicit denial of the efficacy of prayer, of the “prevailing merits” of
sanctity, its value to the society which produces it—the power of a
great and loving spirit to help, infect and reinforce more languid
souls—did we agree that the life of the most strictly enclosed
contemplative was wasted. Christians, who believe that the world was
redeemed from within the narrow limits of Palestine, should not thus
confuse space with power, or character with the manner of its
self-expression. Without the ardent prayers of the mystics, the vivid
spiritual life they lead, what would the sum of human spirituality be?
How can we tell what we owe to the power which they liberate, the
currents which they set up, the contacts which they make? The land they
see, and of which they report to us, is the land towards which humanity
is going. They are like the look-out men upon the cross-trees, assuring
us from time to time that we are still upon our course. Tear asunder
their peculiar power and office from the office of the whole, and you
will have on one side a society deprived of the guides which God has
raised up for it; on the other, an organ deprived of its real perfection
and beauty, because severed from the organism which it was intended to
serve.




                MYSTICISM AND THE DOCTRINE OF ATONEMENT


Amongst the problems which have to be met by those who incline to a
mystical view of Christianity—that view which lays special emphasis on
the growth and experience of the individual soul, its ascent to union
with God, as the very aim and object of religion—one of the most
pressing is that which centres on the doctrine of the Atonement. It is
clear that many people feel that such a mystical and empirical view of
religion leaves no room for this doctrine, or for the idea which it
represents; that they are convinced that there is here a real conflict
between two incompatible views of the Christian faith. On the one hand,
they see orthodox Christianity still centred on the “atoning act” of
Christ, with its implications of reconciliation and vicarious suffering,
of the divine life humiliating itself, in order to do within the
temporal order something for man which man cannot do for himself; a
doctrine which retains its attraction and value, because so full of hope
and mercy for the sinful and the weak. On the other hand, they see that
demand of personal and individual growth, purification,
life-enhancement, progressive union with God—helped doubtless by grace,
but no less dependent on will—as the condition of attaining Eternal
Life, which seems to be made by mystical theology. The opposition, in
fact, is supposed to be between a concept of spiritual life in which
each man must himself do and be, achieve and actualize in his own
person, and not merely as the acceptor of a creed or the member of a
Church—must not only accept the gift, but must set himself to be an
imitator, so far as he may, of the Giver—and one in which a special
manifestation in time and space of the divine power and love, for
Christians the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, does something for the
man accepting it, which he cannot do for himself. In the one case, we
are saved one by one, by effort, response, growth; in the other, we are
saved as members of a group. Here the individual and the corporate
ideals in their most intense forms face one another.

It does, then, seem at first as though we had here an irreconcilable
opposition. Yet before we discard either of these ideas, it is worth
while to enquire whether they need really entail conflict, or can be
regarded as two sides of a greater whole. It is true that there are
certain extreme views of the Atonement which do appear to be hopelessly
irreconcilable with the mystical view of religion: especially those
which lay peculiar stress, not on the latent powers, but on the
essential impotence of man; centring the soul’s salvation on “imputed
righteousness,” and finding the whole meaning and reason of the
Incarnation in the one historical “propitiatory act” of Calvary. There
is real conflict between such a creed, centred on the idea of something
done once for all _to_ the soul—to the world—from outside, and that
which is centred on the idea of a life perpetually welling up _in_ the
soul, on growth, movement, organic change. Yet, on the other hand, is
there not a curious similarity between these two apparently opposite
views of salvation? Is not the drama of the divine life incarnate,
humbling and limiting itself to the human life to save it, essentially a
dramatic representation of that other experience, of the divine life
limiting itself and mysteriously emerging within each soul, to
transmute, regenerate, infinitize it, which the mystics describe to us?
Is not what theologians call “grace”—that essential factor of the mystic
life-process—a making good by the addition of a new dower of
transcendent vitality, of the shortcomings of the merely human creature
regarded as an “inheritor of Eternal Life”; just as the historical
surrender of Calvary is conceived by orthodox Christianity to make good
the shortcomings of the whole race, regarded as heirs of the Kingdom?
And if this be so, then can the opposition between these two ideas of
salvation—the vital and the theological—be as real as it sometimes
appears? Are they not both plans in which atonement plays a part?

After all, both these views of the Christian scheme have emerged and
diverged from the same source. St. Paul, the greatest of all Christian
mystics—soaked, too, in the idea of grace and of growth in grace, and
deeply impressed with the fact of the soul’s individual
responsibility—is also supremely the theologian of the Atonement. Though
no doubt his teaching on the subject was first called forth by the
practical need of finding some meaning in the tragedy of the
crucifixion, it is yet a development of that profound conception of His
own death as a filling up to the brim of the cup of sacrifice and
surrender, which seems to have inspired Christ Himself. If there were
indeed a fundamental inconsistency between these two ideas in their pure
and original form, then St. Paul would be inconsistent; for he certainly
held them both. We all know that the usual way of studying St. Paul’s
“doctrines” for purposes of edification has been to isolate each of his
ardent and poetic utterances, place it, as it were, in cold storage till
it is no longer reminiscent of the living mobile body from which it
came, and then subject it to analysis. We are also beginning to know
that this method is not quite fair to a man who was a poet, an artist, a
lover, as well as a constructive genius of unequalled power. The Pauline
utterances are mostly impassioned efforts to express something which
Paul knows in his own person; descriptions of the way in which the
Christian revelation has met his own needs, regenerated his own nature.
They are closely connected with the interior adventures which have
attended on his new spiritual existence “in Christ.” To adopt a
well-known phrase of St. Bonaventura, they come “of grace, not of
doctrine; of desire, not of intellect; of the ardours of prayer, not of
the teaching of the schools.” To put it in another way, they are the
fruits of his mystical consciousness, which he is trying to express in
artistic or intellectual terms. If we accept this statement then the
fact of Paul’s mystical experience and all that it means to him must
never be absent from our minds when we are trying to understand his
declarations. He lives in that supernal atmosphere which he calls
“Christ-Spirit”; he speaks to us from that sphere. Nothing outside of it
is real to him. Whatever its other bearings may be, his doctrine of
Atonement is solidly real on that plane—the mystic’s plane, the plane of
union—or not at all. When he says he is “crucified _with_ Christ,” “hid
in God _with_ Christ,” he means these things. They are not vaguely pious
utterances, but desperate attempts towards the communication of a real
state, really felt and known. Paul does feel himself welded together
with that Transcendent Life, at once so intimate and personal, so
infinite and universal, which he identifies with the glorified Jesus.
Because of this union—and only because of it—the acts, powers, holiness,
adventures of that life avail for him, Paul. He is a bit of its Body, in
his own bold metaphor. So that the first great factor of salvation, as
he sees it, is the essentially mystical factor of the “union” of the
soul with Christ; the “doing away of the flame of separation.” The
Atonement follows, as it were almost logically, from this.

The general content of his letters makes us feel that St. Paul had an
extremely rich, deep view of life; so great, indeed, that it refuses to
be hammered into a consistent system, and we can never manage to embrace
it all at once. Always bits get left out, and hence there is apt to be a
certain distortion in all our views of the Pauline universe. There was a
wonderful wholeness, a strongly affirmative quality about his sense of
existence; subtractions and negations were unnatural to him. Any
paradoxes and inconsistencies which we find in his statements are the
inevitable result of an effort to express the enormous sweep, the living
multiplicity, and (to borrow a word from William James) the thickness of
his vision of Reality. Hence it follows that he was able to see and
treat the soul of man, both as intensely individual and responsible, and
at the same time as a part of the body of all life; that “mystical body
of many members” of which the head is Christ-Spirit, the Divine Humanity
which appeared in Jesus—a corporation actualized in the Christian
Church, but potentially co-extensive with the whole of mankind. These
two—the separate and the corporate—are aspects of one whole. They seem
to us to conflict, only because the totality to which they contribute is
beyond the focus of the mind. Thus Paul could and did demand of the
individual, on the one hand the self-mergence of faith, the corporate
sense, the humble acknowledgment of personal impotence; and on the other
hand, could demand of that same man the personal industry and
self-dependence which “works out its _own_ salvation,” “runs for an
imperishable garland,” and “presses on towards the goal.”

All through those passages in the Epistle to the Romans on which the
doctrine of the Atonement was afterwards built, Paul seems to be trying
to express—often by the use of traditional images, which of course
revenge themselves upon his free handling of them, as imagery so often
revenges itself upon poets—his vision of something supreme, some
enormous uplift to eternal levels, some fundamental change, achieved by,
for, in the human race. He has this vision just because, and in so far
as, this supreme thing has been achieved by, for, in him, the mystic
Paul. Behind the formula, we feel the first-hand experience. What is
this crucial change? Surely it is the fundamental mystical achievement,
the fundamental religious fact; the human soul’s conscious attainment of
God. At bottom, atonement is wanted simply and solely to help man to do
that; to enable the spirit of life to reach its goal. If we did not want
God, we should be very well satisfied as we are: but we are not
satisfied—“Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts shall find no
rest save in Thee.” No doubt Paul’s eschatological views, the whole
tendency of his time, made him connect this achievement, which he knew
at first hand, with the imminent coming of a Liberator. For him, it was
part of the preparation, the new vitality already given to those who
were destined to live the new life. Achieved in one, it permeated the
whole “new race” of spiritual men; but this is only the interpretation
which a complex of causes made him put upon the transcendent fact. The
prominence given to Paul’s legal imagery, its isolation from the general
trend of his life and thought, has made us inclined to forget all this.
But if we try to see Reality from his angle, to catch the wild accents
of his enthusiasm and his love, the theory that he seriously held
anything approaching what would be called a “commercial” theory of
atonement falls to the ground at once. That he should sometimes have
argued in this sense when cornered by Judaizing opponents, is likely
enough: and it is characteristic of the mystical temperament to ignore
the discrepancy between such intellectual exercises and the fundamental
intuition by which it lives. Life and love are as much the key-words of
Paul’s system as they are of the Fourth Gospel itself. He was the
noblest of souls; and we cannot imagine a soul with a spark of nobility
wanting atonement as a buying-off of penalty incurred, as a paying by
another of a debt which it owes, a mere saving of it from pain or any
other retribution. The living, loving soul can only want atonement as a
road-making act; a bridge thrown out to the infinite, on which man can
travel to his home in God. Now, Paul had made that journey in the
spirit. He knew already, at first hand, that Divine Reality was
accessible to him, and that this contact was the greatest thing in life.
But he knew and felt, too, that however much he, Paul, had really
achieved this new state, this fruition of Eternity, by difficult growth
from within; yet first, he could never have done it at all without the
enormous uplift of enhancing grace, that new dower of energy which was
poured in on him from beyond the confines of his own nature; and
secondly, great though the change had been, yet it was nothing compared
with the immeasurable human possibilities achieved in Christ.

For Paul, these two achievements—the victory of Christ and the victory
of the Christian soul—are intimately connected. True, one is infinitely
great, the other very little. Except Christ, “all have fallen short of
the glory”; have failed to grow up to the “fullness of the stature,” to
actualize the immense spiritual possibilities of man. Still, we are all
in the same line; partakers of the same kind of life, “grace” or
immanent Spirit, and aiming, consciously or unconsciously, at the same
goal—union with God. Now, total dependence on God, the centring of our
whole interest and attention on the Spiritual Order, is the very essence
of union with Him. Everything short of that total dependence, that
supreme rightness of relation, is trespass; a backing of the finite
against the infinite. In the death of Jesus, that total dependence, that
perfect relation, was completely achieved at last: the supreme mystic
act, the self-donation of love, was done perfectly, and in this sense
“once for all.” _Aleph, it is enough._ The spirit of man, in this “new
man,” had overcome its limitations, the downward drag of instinct, and
had leapt to the heights. This was the “redemption that is in Christ
Jesus.” In this unique vindication of humanity, this exhibition of
regnant spirit overcoming the world, Christ-Spirit crowned with
splendour all the tentative efforts of man, and, because of the
corporate nature of humanity, conferred that splendour on the race.

But there is far more in it than this. And first, the Christian’s
achievement of God, such as it is—from that of the least of believers to
that of the greatest of the mystical saints—is really and practically
conditioned by the known fact and known character of the achievement of
Christ. It is the addition of this fact, this distinct historic
happening, to the racial consciousness, which makes possible the
specially Christian apprehension of God; differentiates it, say, from
that of a Hindu or a Neoplatonic saint. A reference to the phenomena of
apperception will help us to understand this. As in the world of nature
or art our perception of each new object is governed by the images and
ideas already dominant within the mind, so, too, in the religious
sphere. If Christians had not got the idea of Calvary in their
consciousness—if the image of the surrender of Jesus, His sublime
exhibition of love and faith, were not there first as a clue, something
about which to group and arrange their spiritual intuitions—it would
make a vital difference to their interpretation of the relation of the
soul to God; and this means that the relation itself would be quite
different for the conscious self, other elements would be stressed, and
different results would flow from it. It is only because the sacrifice
of Jesus is now part of the Christian’s “apperceiving mass”—because,
coming to the contemplation of the spiritual world, he inevitably brings
the Cross with him—that he is able to make the characteristically
Christian contact with God. That Christian contact is a direct gift to
him, from the historic Person and the historic act. We approach the
Transcendent Order _with_ that, or, as Paul tersely puts it, “in
Christ”; and our fruition of Reality results, not, as some extreme
mystics have liked to think, from any “naked apprehension”—for naked
apprehension has no meaning, no content, for the mind—but from a fusion
of that which we bring with us and that to which we ascend; tradition
and experience, the past and the present. Through love of Christ the
Christian comes to the Cross, and through the Cross he enters a
spiritual region he could not reach in any other way. So we find that
even for the most transcendental of Christian contemplatives, still “in
the Cross all doth consist.” It has for him a terror and a rapture which
the judicious philosopher can never know; and reveals to him strange
secrets beyond the province of philosophy.

                   “Vocce legendo, en croce legendo
                     nel libro che c’è ensanguinato
                   Ca essa scrittura me fa en natura
                     ed en filosofia conventato;
                   O libro signato che dentro se’ aurato,
                     e tutto fiorito d’amore!”

That Cross gives the Infinite a colour which it did not have before. So,
even from the point of view of the most hardened and thorough-going
psychologist, Paul’s statement that “through one act of righteousness,
the free gift came unto all men” is literally accurate. It is true—and
that not in any conjuring-trick sense, but in a sense which fulfils on
highest levels life’s basic laws—that “by the grace of one man” “the
gift has abounded to the many,” entincturing and altering the whole
universe, and hence the whole experience, of every receptive soul;
atoning for the faulty attitude, the imperfect love, of average man.

But still this is not all. There are other laws of life gathered up in,
and redistributed from, this great lens. Essentially the idea which the
Christ of the Gospels seems to have had of His own death is the idea of
a making good of some general falling-short on life’s part: a
“filling-up of the cup” of sacrifice and surrender, to balance the other
overflowing cup of error and sin. It is not only man’s unaccomplished
aim, but God’s unaccomplished aim in life, which He is represented as
fulfilling; and the fact that this conception owes a good deal to Old
Testament prophecy need not invalidate its mystical truth. If we accept
this idea, then, as well as showing individual man the way to perfect
union with God—“building the bridge and reforming the road which leads
to the Father’s heart,” as St. Catherine of Siena has it—Christ in His
willing death is somehow performing the very object of life, in the name
of the whole race. The true business of an atoner is a constructive one.
He is called upon to heal a disharmony; bridge a gap between two things
which, though separate, desire to be one. Even the sacrificed animal of
primitive religions seems most often to be a reconciling victim, the
medium of union between the worshipper and his deity. In religions of a
mystical type, then, the Atoner or Redeemer will surely be one who makes
patent those latent possibilities of man which are at once the earnests
of his future blessedness and the causes of his present unrest. He will
achieve the completion and sublimation of our vague instinct for
sacrifice and love, and thus bridge the space between that which is most
divine in humanity and that which is most human in divinity; filling up
the measure of that “glory,” that real and divine life, of which we all
fall short, yet without which we can never be content. Is not this again
what St. Paul feels that Christ did? What he seems, at bottom, to see in
the Passion—though the imagery by which he tries to communicate it often
sounds harsh in our ears—is, the mysterious fulfilment of all cosmic
meanings; the perfect surrender to infinite ideals of Man, the compound
inhabitant of two possible orders of reality, who by this painful
self-loss achieves perfect identification with the Divine will. This
fulfilment was, as he distinctly says, the duty and destiny of the human
soul. All creation looks for it “with outstretched neck.” But all have
fallen short. Christ, the perfect man, does it, does what man was always
meant to do; and because of the corporate character of humanity, in His
utter transcendence of self-hood and of all finite categories He
inevitably lifts up, to share His union with God, all who are in union
with Him. The essence of the Atonement, then, would not lie so much in
the sacrificial act as in the lift-up of the human spirit which that act
guarantees; the new levels of life which it opens for the race. “Much
more, being reconciled, shall we be saved _in his life_,” says Paul.

“In his life” a new summit has been conquered by humanity. But are we to
stop there? Is not the attainment of that same summit, the achievement
of that life-giving surrender to the Universal Spirit—“a life-giving
life,” Ruysbroeck calls it—just what the great mystics, following as
well as they can the curve of the life of Christ, try to do according to
their measure? Theirs, after all, is the vision which sees that “there
is no other way to _life_ but the way of the Cross,” and that the human
life of Christ is “the door by which all must come in.” Thus the
spiritual victory of the Cross is for them not so much a unique, as a
pioneer act. It is the first heroic cutting of a road on which they are
to travel as far as they can; not merely the vicarious setting-right of
the balance between God and man, upset by man’s wilful sin. In their
ascent towards union with God, are not they road-makers, or at any rate
road-menders, too? Are they not forging new links between two orders of
reality, which are separate for the once-born consciousness? If so, then
we may regard each one of them as a bit of the slowly achieved atonement
of the race; that gradual pressing-on of humanity into the heart of the
Transcendent Order. For Christians, this movement was initiated by
Christ. But surely it is continued and helped by every soul in union
with Him, even those who knew not His Name; and Julian of Norwich was
right when she said that she knew she was “in the Cross with Him.”

Two things are perpetually emphasized in modern presentations of
religion. First, the stress tends more and more to be upon experience.
Nothing which authority tells us is done for us truly counts, unless we
feel and realize it as done in us. In so far as this is so, the tendency
is to a mystical concept of religion; and, speaking generally, to just
the concept of religion which is supposed to conflict with the idea of
atonement as usually understood. But, secondly, the social and corporate
character of Christianity is strongly emphasized; and, where this
corporate character is admired more than it is understood, mysticism is
harshly criticized as the religion of the spiritual individualist, a
“vertical relation,” the “flight of the alone to the Alone.” St. Paul’s
“completing opposites,” in fact, are still in the foreground of our
religious life; and so perhaps some re-statement of the solution by
which he found room for both of them, and hence both for personal
responsibility and atonement, may be possible and fruitful for us, too.

And first we notice that those enthusiasts for the corporate idea who
condemn the mystics as religious egoists seem to forget that they are
contradicting themselves; that if their vision of the Church of Christ
as a mystical _body_ be true, then the mystic’s ascent to God cannot be
a flight of the Alone. The poisonous implication of that phrase—true in
its context but always misunderstood—has stuck like mud to the white
robes of the saints. But the mystic is not merely a self going out on a
solitary quest of Reality. He can, must, and does go only as a member of
the whole body, performing as it were the function of a specialized
organ. What he does, he does for all. He is, in fact, an atoner pure and
simple: something stretched out to bridge a gap, something which makes
good in a particular direction the general falling-short. The special
kind of light or life which he receives, he receives for the race; and,
conversely, the special growth which he is able to achieve comes from
the race. He depends on it for his past; it depends on him for its
future. All are part of life’s great process of becoming; there are no
breaks. Although there is perfect individualization, there is
interpenetration too. His attainment is the attainment of the whole,
pressing on behind him, supporting him. Thus—to take an obvious
example—the achievement of peculiar sanctity by the member of a
religious order is the achievement of that order in him; and this not in
a fantastic and metaphorical sense. The support of the Rule, the
conditions of the life, the weight of tradition, the special characters
which each religious family inherits from its Patriarch, have all
contributed something to make the achievement possible; and are factors
governing the type which that achievement assumes. We recognize the
Cistercian stamp upon St. Bernard, the Dominican on Suso and Tauler, the
Carmelite on St. John of the Cross. Each such case vindicates once more
the incarnational principle; it is the true spirit of the community,
flowering in this representative of theirs, which we see. Thus, as we
may regard Christ from one point of view as supremely ideal Man
incarnate—the “heavenly man” as Paul calls Him—summing up, fulfilling,
lifting to new heights all that came before, and therefore actualizing
all that humanity was ever intended to do, and changing for ever more
the character of its future achievements; so, in a small way, we may
regard St. Teresa as Carmel, the ideal Carmel, incarnate. Each is a
concrete fact which atones for the falling-short of a whole type, and
yet is conditioned by that type. The thought of what the Carmelite life
was meant to do, the pressure of that idea seeking manifestation, did
condition Teresa’s achievement. Are we not also bound to say that the
thought of the Jewish visions of an ideal humanity, of the Son of Man
and the Suffering Servant, did condition the external accidents of the
life and death of Christ?

So as to the past. Still more as to the future are the corporate and
individual aspects of spiritual life inextricably twined together. As
that done by one is an outbirth of the whole, so that done to one may
avail for the whole. Only by staying within the circle of this thought—a
thought which surely comes very close to the doctrine of Atonement—can
we form a sane and broad idea of what the mystic, and the mystic’s
experience, mean for the race. Consider again the case of Teresa. As,
even in a time and place of considerable monastic corruption—for no one
who has read her life and letters can regard the Convent of the
Incarnation as a forcing-house of the spiritual life—still the idea of
her order conditioned her great and Godward-tending soul, and her
dedicated life filled up the measure of its glory; yet more has Teresa’s
own, separate, unique achievement conditioned the spirit of her order
ever since. All the saints which it has nourished have been salted with
her salt. All that she won has flowed out from her in life-giving
streams to others. She has been a regenerator of the religious life, has
achieved the ideal of Richard Rolle, and become a “pipe of life” through
which the living water can pass from God to man. Is not this, too,
rather near the idea of Atonement, a curiously close and faithful
imitation of Christ; especially when we consider the amount of unselfish
suffering which such a career entails?

The objective of the Christian life, we say, is union with God: that
paradoxical victory-in-surrender of love which translates us from finite
to infinite levels. Most of us in this present life and in our own
persons fall short of the glory of this. We are not all equally full of
grace; we do not all grow up to the full stature of the Sons of God; and
it is no use pretending that we do. But the mystical saint does achieve
this, and by this act of mediation—this “vicarious” achievement, if you
like to put it so—performed by a member of our social organism, the gift
does really “abound unto the many.” For what other purpose, indeed, are
these apparently elect souls bred up? What other social value can we
attribute to them than that which we see them actually possessing in
history—the value, that is, of special instruments put forth by the
race, to do or suffer something which the average self cannot do, but
which humanity as a whole, in its Godward ascent, must, can, and shall
do; ducts, too, whereby fresh spiritual energy flows in to mankind;
eyes, open to visions beyond the span of average sight; parents of new
life. Carlyle said that a hero was “a man sent hither to make the divine
mystery more impressively known to us”—to atone, in fact, for the
inadequacy of our own perception of Reality, our perpetual relapses to
lower levels of life; to make a bridge between us and the Transcendent
Order. And when the hero as mystic does this, is he not in a special
sense a close imitator of Christ?

We seem to have here the highest example of a principle which is
operative through the whole of the seething complex of life, for there
is a sense on which every great personality fulfils the function of an
atoner. On the one hand he does something towards the making good of
humanity’s “falling short” in one direction or another; on the other
hand, he gives to his fellow-men—adds to their universe—something which
they did not possess before. Burke, speaking of the social contract, has
said that society is a partnership in all science, all art, every
virtue, and all perfection; and, since the ends of such a partnership
cannot be obtained but in many generations, it is a partnership between
the living, the dead, and the unborn. “Each contract of each particular
state,” he says, “is but a clause in the great primæval contract of
eternal society, _linking the lower with the higher natures_, connecting
the visible and the invisible world, according to a fixed compact
sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral
natures each in their appointed place.” In such a partnership—linking
higher and lower, visible and invisible worlds in one—the creative
spirits in every department of life may properly be called “atoners,”
for they have a corporate and racial value which is in exact proportion
to their individual achievement of reality. Thus the great artist, or
the great musician, really redeems his fellows from slavery to a lower
level of colour, form, sound. He atones for their dullness towards that
which has always been there, and endows them with new possibilities of
vision and hearing; gives them, in fact, more abundant life; is the
Door, the Way, to a wider universe. His creative acts open new gates to
the whole race. The fact that he has lived and worked has effected a
permanent change in the stream of life, which can never again be that
which it was before. If we were more accustomed, on the one hand, to
look at the achievements of religious genius from the artistic and
creative point of view, and on the other hand, to discern the work of
the Holy Spirit in the artistic as well as the religious field, I
believe that we should find a close parallel between the work of supreme
personality redeeming spirit, and the work of the great artist redeeming
sense, from servitude to old imperfections and disharmonies.

We might almost make it the test of true greatness, this wonderful power
of flinging out the filaments of life in all directions; this way in
which noble and creative personalities of every type seem to be so much
more than themselves—to count for so much more than themselves—to be, in
their generous activities, the servants of all life. They appear to be
the sum of tendencies which preceded them; and to gather those
tendencies to a focus and distribute them again, enhanced and
re-directed, to succeeding generations of souls. Such a personality has
to the full the divine power of giving and of taking. Whilst he seems
specially original, it is always true that the past, the race, nourishes
him to an enormous extent. Christ Himself conformed to this law. The
great man is rooted in history, plaited up in the life of his own time:
absorbs from the human as well as from the spiritual. His feet are in
Time, though his head is in Eternity. He is never isolated and
ring-fenced. Where he seems so, that appearance is found on examination
to be deceptive, as Dr. Rufus Jones has shown in the case of Jacob
Boehme, and Baron von Hügel in that of George Fox. So, again, the
special act, vision, or experience of the spiritual genius never ends
with him. He is a centre of divine fecundity—it is the mystics’ own
phrase. The touch of the divine life stimulates him to creation. He is a
regenerator, a whirlpool of new forces, a parent of new things. It seems
that life’s “tendency to lag behind,” its tendency _not_ to do its best,
receives its corrective in all such great spirits; and the Christian
atonement becomes the supreme, the divine manifestation of a vital law
which we find operative on every level of existence.

If we acknowledge the extent to which Grace, Spirit, God, works on man
through personality, through specific men—as a communication of
transcendent vitality to certain souls (“elect,” if you like) in order
that they may bring forth new life, new vision, new goodness, may
fertilize the race afresh—then shall we not expect to find that
Christianity, being a vital, dynamic system, has exhibited and
emphasized these facts throughout the whole of her great career? This
outward thrust of great personalities from the social organism, these
fresh unique saving contacts made by the individual in the name of the
All, these sudden, incalculable, upward leaps of life, these changes in
the national consciousness which the hero, poet, prophet can produce—we
shall expect to find all this operative in the highest degree in the
Christian Church. We shall expect to find her claiming for her greatest
and most God-achieving spirits, not only special honour, but a special
value, a special redeeming power in respect of the corporate body to
which they belong; and this, of course, is exactly what we do find. The
mystical saints, in fact, seem to provide us with a link between the
doctrine of the Atonement—of the special racial value of the utterly
surrendered life in God, which was once, and once only, perfectly
achieved—and the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, or
interpenetration and mutual help of all souls “in Christ.” From these
two ideas there follows of necessity that further doctrine of the
“prevailing merits” of the saints, their special “atoning” value for
other men, the corporate social work done by heroic virtue flowering in
individual souls, which the Catholic Church has always deduced from
them. At the back of both ideas we find the same fact; that Life and
Love, when supremely evoked within the temporal order, cannot keep
themselves to themselves. Such life and such love have, in spite of
their marked individuality, a profoundly social character; they are
violently contagious; they spread, they interpenetrate, they transmute
all selves that will receive them. They entincture the whole stream of
duration, make good its shortcomings, make widening circles of splendour
within the flux.

So, if we want to think of a Celestial Hierarchy, actual to us, founded
in history, related with us by a thousand links, it is surely of the
saints and the mystics that we ought to think; rising as it were in
graduated orders, according to the strength and purity of their union
with God, the fullness of their possession of Eternal Life, towards the
Cross in which their tendencies are perfected and gathered up. These are
amongst the highest values which life has given to us. The apostolic
type; the men of action, dynamic manifestations of the Spirit. The
prophetic type; men of supreme vision, enlarging the horizons of the
world. The martyr-type; men of utter sacrifice and complete interior
surrender. These are the three ways in which the mystical passion for
God breaks out through humanity. These three types make good—atone
for—our corporate spiritual shortcomings; redeem the dead level of that
race which has thrust them forth towards the Infinite.

Perhaps it seems to us that their difference from us is too great; that
they are cut off, divided by a chasm from the common experience of man
to form an exclusive, “other-worldly” type. Their life rises up like a
great mountain, full of beauty and strangeness; and ours is like the
homely plain. But there is no break between the plain and the mountain.
It is pushed out from us, it is part of us; its value is bound up with
the value of the whole—with our value, as struggling, growing men. It,
every inch of it, atones for our flatness and enhances the average level
of the race. We have all seen in Catholic countries how a sudden hill
with a Calvary on its summit can glorify and atone for the whole
landscape—so poor without it, so noble with it—from which it is lifted
up. Now the Cross is, and remains, the central feature in the Christian
landscape too: but is it not the long slope of that hill, going from the
common level to the heights, which makes it so homely to us, so
accessible to us, so supremely a part of us, and completes its task of
linking humanity and divinity?

These are some of the reasons why the doctrine of Atonement seems to be
closely bound up with the mystical vision of life, and hard to
understand—whether we mean by it a spiritual principle or a historic
event—without that mystical vision. We have Christianity saying to us,
on the one hand, that the utmost ideal of humanity, the ideal of perfect
self-donation to the purposes of Spirit, perfect self-surrender to the
interests of the All, was completely and transcendently achieved in
Jesus. In Him man leapt to the heights; and this unique attainment
counts for the whole race. But, on the other hand, it says that all who
can are called to go as far as they are able on the same road; to “fill
up the measure of the sufferings,” to “grow to the full stature,” to
“press on to the high calling” of the human soul. Through these more
vital personalities—the mystics, the twice-born, the saints—the radiance
of the spiritual streams out on the race; God speaks to man through man.
Such personalities act as receivers and transmitters; they really and
practically distribute the flashes of the Uncreated Light. Their
activities are vicarious; they do atone for the disabilities of other
men. Therefore the social value of the mystics, their place in the
organism, is intimately connected with the atoning idea. Were it not for
the principle which the doctrine of Atonement expresses, the mystics
would be spiritual individualists, whose life and experience would be
meaningless except for themselves. And were it not for the continuance
of the mystical life, the perpetual renewal of the mystical
self-donation in love, its known value for the race, then the historic
Atonement of Jesus would be an isolated act, unrelated to the great
processes of the Spiritual World, of which it should form the crown.




                     THE MYSTIC AS CREATIVE ARTIST


Hostile criticism of the mystics almost invariably includes the charge
that their great experiences are in the nature of merely personal
satisfactions. It is said that they stand apart from the ruck of
humanity, claiming a special knowledge of the supersensual, a special
privilege of communion with it; yet do not pass on to others, in any
real and genuine sense, the illumination, the intuition of Reality,
which they declare that they have received. St. Bernard’s favourite
mistranslation from Isaiah, “My secret to myself,” has again and again
been used against them with damaging effect; linked sometimes with the
notorious phrase in which Plotinus defined the soul’s fruition of
Eternity as “a flight of the alone to the Alone.”

It is true that these hints concerning a solitary and ineffable
encounter do tally with one side of the experience of the mystic; do
describe one aspect of his richly various, many-angled spiritual
universe, one way in which that divine union which is his high objective
is apprehended by the surface-consciousness. But that which is here
told, is only half the truth. There is another side, a “completing
opposite,” to this admittedly indescribable union of hearts; a side
which is often—and most ungraciously—forgotten by those who have
received its benefits. The great mystic’s loneliness is a consecrated
loneliness. When he ascends to that encounter with Divine Reality which
is his peculiar privilege, he is not a spiritual individualist. He goes
as the ambassador of the race. His spirit is not, so to speak, a “spark
flying upwards” from this world into that world, flung out from the mass
of humanity, cut off; a little, separate, brilliant thing. It is more
like a feeler, a tentacle, which life as a whole stretches out into that
supersensual world which envelops her. Life stretches that tentacle out,
but she also draws it in again with the food that it has gathered, the
news that it has to tell of the regions which its delicate tactile sense
has enabled it to explore. This, it seems to me, is the function of the
mystic consciousness in respect of the human race. For this purpose it
is specialized. It receives, in order that it may give. As the prophet
looks at the landscape of Eternity, the mystic finds and feels it: and
both know that there is laid on them the obligation of exhibiting it if
they can.

If this be so, then it becomes clear that the mystic’s personal
encounter with Infinite Reality represents only one of the two movements
which constitute his completed life. He must turn back to pass on the
revelation he has received: must mediate between the transcendent and
his fellow-men. He is, in fact, called to be a creative artist of the
highest kind; and only when he is such an artist, does he fulfil his
duty to the race.

It is coming to be realized more and more clearly that it is the
business of the artist not only to delight us, but to enlighten us: in
Blake’s words, to “Cleanse the doors of perception, so that everything
may appear as it is—infinite.” Artists mediate between the truth and
beauty which they know, and those who cannot without their help discern
it. It is the function of art, says Hegel, to deliver to the domain of
feeling and delight of vision all that the mind may possess of essential
and transcendent Being. In this respect it ranks with religion and
philosophy as “one of the three spheres of Absolute Spirit.” Bergson,
again, declares that it is the peculiar business of art to brush aside
everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face
with the real, the true. The artist is the man who sees things in their
native purity.

“Could reality,” he observes in a celebrated passage, “come into direct
contact with sense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate
communion with things and with ourselves—then, we should all be
artists.... Deep in our souls we should hear the uninterrupted melody of
our inner life: a music often gay, more often sad, always original. All
this is around and within us: yet none of it is distinctly perceived by
us. Between nature and ourselves—more, between ourselves and our own
consciousness—hangs a veil: a veil dense and opaque for normal men, but
thin, almost transparent, for the artist and poet.” He might have added,
for the mystic too.

This veil, he says again, is woven of self-interest: we perceive things,
not as they are, but as they affect ourselves. The artist, on the
contrary, sees them for their own sakes, with the eyes of disinterested
love. So, when the mystics declare to us that the first conditions of
spiritual illumination are self-simplification, humility and detachment,
they are demanding just those qualities which control the artist’s power
of seeing things in their beauty and truth. The true mystic sees Reality
in its infinite aspect; and tries, as other artists, to reveal it within
the finite world. He not only ascends, but descends the ladder of
contemplation; having heard “the uninterrupted music of the inner life,”
he tries to weave it into melodies that other men can understand.

Bergson’s contemporary, Eucken, claims—and I think it is one of his most
striking doctrines—that man is gradually but actually bringing into
existence a spiritual world. This spiritual world springs up from within
through humanity—that is, through man’s own consciousness—yet at the
same time humanity is, as it were, growing up into it; finding it as an
independent reality, waiting to be apprehended, waiting to be
incorporated into our universe. In respect of man’s normal universe,
this spiritual world is both immanent and transcendent: “Absent only
from those unable to perceive it,” as Plotinus said of the _Nous_. We
are reminded of the Voice which said to St. Augustine, “I am the Food of
the Full-grown.”

This paradox of a wholly new order of experience thrusting itself up
through the race which it yet transcends, is a permanent feature in the
teachings of the higher religions and philosophies, and is closely
connected with the phenomena of inspiration and of artistic creation.
The artist, the prophet, the metaphysician, each builds up from material
beyond the grasp of other souls, a world within which those other souls
can live and dream: a world, moreover, which exhibits in new proportions
and endows with new meanings the common world of daily life. When we ask
what organ of the race—the whole body of humanity—it is, by and through
which this supernal world thus receives expression, it becomes clear
that this organ is the corporate spiritual consciousness, emerging in
those whom we call, pre-eminently, mystics and seers. It is, actually
and literally, through them that this new world is emerging and being
built up; as it is through other forms of enhanced and clarified
consciousness, in painters, musicians, philosophers, and the adepts of
physical science, that other aspects of the universe are made known to
men. In all of these, and in the mystic too, the twin powers of a
steadfast, selective attention and of creative imagination are at work.
Because of their wide, deep, attention to life they receive more news
from the external world than others do; because of the creative cast of
their minds, they are able to weave up the crude received material into
a living whole, into an idea or image which can be communicated to other
men. Ultimately, we owe to the mystics all the symbols, ideas and images
of which our spiritual world, as it is thought of by the bulk of men, is
constructed. We take its topography from them, at second-hand: and often
forget the sublime adventures immortalized in those phrases which we
take so lightly on our lips—the Divine Dark, the Beatific Vision, the
Eternal Beauty, Ecstasy, Union, Spiritual Marriage, and the rest. The
mystics have actually created, from that language which we have evolved
to describe and deal with the time-world, another artistic world; a
self-consistent and spiritually expressive world of imaginative
concepts, like the world of music or the world of colour and form. They
are always trying to give us the key to it, to induct us into its
mysterious delights. It is by means of this world, and the symbols which
furnish it, that human consciousness is enabled to actualize its most
elusive experiences; and hence it is wholly due to the unselfish labours
of those mystics who have struggled to body forth the realities by which
they were possessed, that we are able, to some extent, to enter into the
special experiences of the mystical saints; and that they are able to
snatch us up to a brief sharing of their vision, to make us live for a
moment “Eternal Life in the midst of Time.”

How, then, have they done this? What is the general method by which any
man communicates the result of his personal contacts with the universe
to other minds? Roughly speaking, he has two ways of doing this, by
description and by suggestion; and his best successes are those in which
these two methods are combined. His descriptions are addressed to the
intellect, his suggestions are appeals to the imagination, of those with
whom he is trying to communicate. The necessities which control these
two ways of telling the news—oblique suggestion and symbolic
image—practically govern the whole of mystical literature. The span of
this literature is wide. It goes from the utterly formless, yet
infinitely suggestive, language of certain great contemplatives, to the
crisply formal pictorial descriptions of those whose own revelations of
Reality crystallize into visions, voices, or other psycho-sensorial
experiences. At one end of the scale is the vivid, prismatic imagery of
the Christian apocalypse, at the other the fluid, ecstatic poetry of
some of the Sūfi saints.

In his suggestive and allusive language the mystical artist often
approaches the methods of music. When he does this, his statements do
not give information. They operate a kind of enchantment which dilates
the consciousness of the hearer to a point at which it is able to
apprehend new aspects of the world. In his descriptive passages, on the
other hand, he generally proceeds, as do nearly all our descriptive
efforts, by way of comparison. Yet often these comparisons, like those
employed by the great poet, are more valuable for their strange
suggestive quality than for any exact parallels which they set up
between the mystic’s universe and our own. Thus, when Clement of
Alexandria compares the Logos to a “New Song,” when Suso calls the
Eternal Wisdom a “sweet and beautiful wild flower,” when Dionysius the
Areopagite speaks of the Divine Dark which _is_ the Inaccessible Light,
or Ruysbroeck of “the unwalled world,” we recognize a sudden flash of
the creative imagination; evoking for us a truth far greater, deeper and
more fruitful than the merely external parallel which it suggests. So
too with many common metaphors of the mystics: the Fire of Love, the
Game of Love, the Desert of God, the Marriage of the Soul. Such phrases
succeed because of their interior and imaginative appeal.

We have numerous examples of this kind of artistic language—the highly
charged imaginative phrase—in the Bible; especially in the prophetic
books, and the Apocalypse.

    Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.
    I will give thee treasures of darkness and hidden riches of secret
       places.
    The Lord shall be a diadem of beauty.
    He showed me a pure river of the water of life.
    I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters.
    I saw a new heaven and a new earth.

Whereas the original prophetic significance of these phrases is now
meaningless for us, their suggestive quality—their appeal to the mystic
consciousness—retains its full force. They are artistic creations; and
have the enormous evocative power proper to all great art. Later mystics
use such passages again and again, reading their own experiences into
these traditional forms. The classic example of this close alliance
between poetic readings of life and practical mysticism is of course the
mystical interpretation of the _Song of Songs_, which appears in
Christian mysticism at least as early as the fourth century. But there
are many other instances. Thus St. Macarius finds in Ezekiel’s vision of
the Cherubim a profoundly suggestive image of the state of the deified
soul, “all eyes and all wings,” driven upon its course by the Heavenly
Charioteer of the Spirit. Thus in _The Mirror of Simple Souls_, another
of Ezekiel’s visions—that of the “great eagle, with great wings, long
wings, full of feathers, which took the highest branch of the
cedar”—becomes the vivid symbol of the contemplative mind, “the eagle
that flies high, so right high and yet more high than does any other
bird, for she is feathered with fine love, and beholds above other the
beauty of the sun.”

When we pass to the mystical poets, we find that nearly all their best
effects are due to their extraordinary genius for this kind of indirect,
suggestive imagery. This is the method by which they proceed when they
wish to communicate their vision of reality. Their works are full of
magical phrases which baffle analysis, yet, as one of them has said:

                “Lighten the wave-washed caverns of the mind
                With a pale, starry grace.”

Many of these phrases are of course familiar to every one. Vaughan’s

               “I saw Eternity the other night
               Like a great ring of pure and endless light.”

Blake’s

                  “To see a world in a grain of sand
                    And a heaven in a wild flower,
                  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
                    And eternity in an hour.”

Whitman’s

             “Light rare, untellable, lighting the very light.”

Thompson’s

                   “Ever and anon a trumpet sounds
                   From the hid battlements of Eternity.”

These are artistic, sidelong representations of the mystic’s direct
apprehension of the Infinite on, so to speak, its cosmic and impersonal
side. Others reflect the personal and intimate contact with the Divine
Life which forms the opposite side of his complete experience. Thus
Francis Thompson:

                           “With his aureole
                           The tresses of my soul
                               Are blent
                           In wished content.”

So, too, St. John of the Cross:

                 “All things I then forgot,
                   My cheek on him who for my coming came;
                 All ceased, and I was not,
                   Leaving my cares and shame
                   Among the lilies, and forgetting them.”

Best of all, perhaps, Jalāluddin Rūmi:

    “In a place beyond uttermost place, in a tract without shadow of
       trace,
    Soul and body transcending I live, in the soul of my loved one
       anew.”

Sometimes the two aspects, personal and impersonal, are woven together
by the poet: and then it is that we come nearest to an understanding of
the full experience he is trying to express. A remarkable example of
this occurs in Gerard Hopkins, perhaps the greatest mystical poet of the
Victorian era:

             “Thou mastering me
           God! giver of breath and bread;
         World’s strand, sway of the sea;
           Lord of the living and dead;
     Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
     And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
         Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
     Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.”

             “I kiss my hand
           To the stars, lovely-asunder
         Starlight, wafting him out of it; and
           Glow, glory in thunder;
     Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west:
     Since, though he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,
         His mystery must be instressed, stressed;
     For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.”

So much for the poets. In the prose writings of the mystics we find
again the same characters, the same high imaginative qualities, the same
passionate effort to give the ineffable some kind of artistic form. This
effort includes in its span a wide range of literary artifices; some
endeavouring to recapture and represent in concrete symbols the
objective reality known; some, like one dominant art movement of the
present day, trying to communicate it obliquely, by a representation of
the subjective feeling-state induced in the mystic’s own consciousness.
At one end of the scale, therefore, we have the so-called negative
language of mysticism, which describes the supersensuous in paradox by
refusing to describe it at all; by declaring that the entry of the soul
upon spiritual experience is an entry into a Cloud of Unknowing, a
nothing, a Divine Darkness, a fathomless abyss. The curious thing is,
that though here, if anywhere, the mystic seems to keep his secret to
himself, as a matter of fact it is just this sort of language which has
been proved to possess the highest evocative power. For many types of
mind, this really does fling magic casements wide; does give us a
momentary glimpse of the perilous seas. I am inclined to think that,
many and beautiful as are the symbolic and pictorial creations of
mystical genius, it is here that this genius works most freely, produces
its most magnificent results. When Ruysbroeck speaks of the boundless
abyss of pure simplicity, that “dim silence where all lovers lose
themselves”; when he assures us that, “stripped of its very life,” the
soul is destined to “sail the wild billows of that Sea Divine,” surely
he effects a true change in our universe. So, too, the wonderful series
of formless visions—though “vision” is a poor word for intuitive
experience of this sort—experienced by Angela of Foligno, far exceed in
their suggestive power her vividly pictured conversations with Christ,
when she declares that she beheld “those eyes and that face so gracious
and so pleasing.”

“I beheld,” she says of her ultimate experience of the Absolute, “a
Thing, as fixed and stable as it was indescribable; and more than this I
cannot say, save what I have often said already, namely, that it was all
good. And though my soul beheld not love, yet when it saw that ineffable
Thing it was itself filled with unutterable joy, and it was taken out of
the state it was in, and placed in this great and ineffable state....
But if thou seekest to know that which I beheld, I can tell thee
nothing, save that I beheld a Fullness and a Clearness, and felt them
within me so abundantly that I cannot describe it, nor give any image
thereof: for what I beheld was not bodily, but as though it were in
heaven. Thus I beheld a beauty so great that I can say nothing of it
save that I saw the Supreme Beauty, which contains in itself all
goodness.”

In the end, all that Angela has said here is, “Come and see!” but in
saying this, she tells us far more than many do who go about to measure
the City of Contemplation. Here words suggest, they do not tell; entice,
but do not describe. Reminding us of the solemn declaration of Thomas à
Kempis, that “there is a distance incomparable between those things that
imperfect men think, and those that men illumined by high revelation
behold,” they yet extend to other minds a musical invitation to
intercourse with new orders of reality.

This sort of language, this form of paradoxical, suggestive, allusive
art is a permanent feature in mystical literature. It is usually
supposed to be derived through Dionysius the Areopagite from the
Platonists, but is really far older than this. As it comes down the
centuries, it develops in depth and richness. Each successive mystic
takes up the imagery of negation where the last one leaves it—takes it,
because he recognizes that it describes a country where he too has
been—and adds to it the products of his own most secret and august
experiences. As in the torch-race of the antique world, the illuminating
symbol, once lit, is snatched from hand to hand, and burns ever brighter
as it is passed on.

I take one example of this out of many. Nearly all the great mystics of
the later Middle Ages speak of the Wilderness or Desert of Deity;
suggesting thus that sense of great, swept spaces, “beyond the polar
circle of the mind”—of a plane of experience destitute of all the homely
furniture of thought—which seems to characterize a certain high type, or
stage, of contemplation. It represents the emergence of the self into a
real universe—a “place beyond uttermost place”—unrelated to the
categories of thought, and is substantially the same experience which
Dionysius the Areopagite and those mystics who follow him call the
Divine Ignorance or the Dark, and which his English interpreter names
the Cloud of Unknowing, where the soul feels itself to be lost. But each
mystic who uses this traditional image of amazement—really the
description of a psychological situation, not of an objective
reality—gives to it a characteristic touch; each has passed it through
the furnace of his own passionate imagination, and slightly modified its
temper and its form. This place, or state, says Eckhart, is “a still
wilderness where no one is at home.” It is “the quiet desert of the
Godhead,” says Tauler; “So still, so mysterious, so desolate! The great
wastes to be found in it have neither image, form, nor condition.” Yet,
says Richard Rolle—suddenly bringing the positive experience of the
contemplative heart to the rescue of the baffled contemplative mind—in
this same wilderness consciousness _does_ set up an ineffable
correspondence with Reality.

“[There] speaks the loved to the heart of the lover; as it were a
bashful lover, that his sweetheart before men entreats not, nor
friendly-wise but commonly and as a stranger kisses ... and anon comes
heavenly joy, marvellously making merry melody.”

Here the mystic, with an astonishing boldness, weaves together spatial,
personal and musical imagery, positive and negative experience, in order
to produce his full effect.

Finally, St. John of the Cross, great thinker, manly and heroic mystic,
and true poet, effects a perfect synthesis of these positive and
negative experiences—that apparent self-loss in empty spaces which is
also, mysteriously, an encounter of love.

“The soul in dim contemplation (he says) is like a man who sees
something for the first time, the like of which he has never seen before
... hence it feels like one who is placed in a wild and vast solitude
where no human being can come; an immense wilderness without limits. But
this wilderness is the more delicious, sweet and lovely, the more it is
wide, vast and lonely; for where the soul seems most to be lost, there
it is most raised up above all created things.”

All this language, as I have said, belongs to the oblique and
paradoxical side of the mystic’s art; and comes to us from those who are
temperamentally inclined to that pure contemplation which “has no
image.” Psychologically speaking, these mystics are closer to the
musician than to any other type of artist, though they avail themselves
when they wish of material drawn from all the arts. But there is another
kind of mystic, naturally inclined to visualization, who tends to
translate his supersensual experience into concrete, pictorial images;
into terms of colour and of form. He uses, in fact, the methods of the
painter, the descriptive writer, sometimes of the dramatist, rather than
those of the musician or the lyric poet. He is, I think, as a rule much
less impressive than the artist of the illusive kind, and is seldom so
successful in putting us into communion with reality. On the other
hand—and partly because of his more concrete method—he is the more
generally understood. For one person to whom Plotinus or Ruysbroeck
communicates his sublime intuition of reality, a hundred accept at their
face-value, as true “revelations,” the visions of St. Gertrude or St.
Teresa.

The picture-making proceedings of this type of mystical artist are of
two kinds. Sometimes they are involuntary, sometimes deliberate. Often
we find both forms in the same individual; for instance, in Mechthild of
Magdeburg and in Suso, where it is sometimes extremely difficult to find
the dividing line between true visionary experience entirely outside the
self’s control, and the intense meditation, or poetic apprehension of
truth, which demands a symbolic and concrete form for its literary
expression. In both cases an act of artistic creation has taken place;
in one below, in the other above, the normal threshold of consciousness.
In true visionaries, the translation of the supersensual into sensual
terms is uncontrolled by the surface intellect; as it is indeed in many
artists. Without the will or knowledge of the subject, intuitions are
woven up into pictures, cadences, words; and, by that which
psychologists call a psycho-sensorial automatism, the mystic seems to
himself to receive the message of Reality in a pictorial, verbal,
dramatic or sometimes a musical form—“coming in to his body by the
windows of the wits,” as one old writer has it.

Thus the rhythmic phrases in which the Eternal Wisdom speaks to Suso, or
the Divine Voice to St. Catherine of Siena, verge on poetic composition;
but poetic composition of the automatic type, uncontrolled by the
mystic’s surface-mind. Thus, too, the great fluid visions of the
prophets, the sharply definite, often lovely, pictures which surge up
before the mind of Suso, the Mechthilds, St. Gertrude, Angela of
Foligno, of the great St. Teresa herself, are symbolic pictures which
represent an actual interior experience, a real contact with the
supersensual; exhibiting the interpretative power inherent in the
mystical imagination. These pictures are seen by the mystic—sometimes,
as he says, within the mind, sometimes as projections in space—always in
sharp definition, lit by that strong light which is peculiar to
visionary states. They are not produced by any voluntary process of
composition, but loom up, as do the best creations of other artists,
from his deeper mind, bringing with them an intense conviction of
reality. Good instances are the visions which so often occur at
conversion, or mark the transition from one stage of the mystic way to
another: for example, the mystic marriage of St. Catherine of Siena, or
that vision of the Upper School of True Resignation, which initiated
Suso into the “dark night of the soul.” I believe that we may look on
such visions as allied to dream-states; but in the case of the great
mystics they are the richly significant waking-dreams of creative
genius, not the confused and meaningless dreaming of normal men. Suso
himself makes this comparison, and says that none but the mystic can
distinguish vision from dream. In character they vary as widely as do
the creations of the painter and the poet. The personal and intimate,
the remote and metaphysical, sides of the spiritual life are richly
represented in them. Sometimes the elements from which they are built up
come from theology, sometimes from history, legend, nature, or human
life. But in every case the “glory of the lighted mind” shines on them.

Often a particularly delicate and gay poetic feeling—a faëry touch—shows
itself in the symbolic pictures by which these mystics try to represent
their encounter with the spiritual world. Coventry Patmore once spoke of
a “sphere of rapture and dalliance” to which the great contemplatives
are raised; and it is from such a sphere that these seem to turn back to
us, trying, by direct appeals to our sense of joy, the most stunted of
our spiritual faculties, to communicate their exultant experience of
that Kingdom of Reality which is neither “here” nor “there” but
“everywhere.”

Music and dancing, birds and flowers, the freshness of a living, growing
world, all simple joyous things, all airy beauties, are used in the
effort to tell us of that vision which Clement called the privilege of
love. When we read these declarations we feel that it is always
spring-time in those gardens of the soul of which they tell. St. John of
the Cross, who described those spiritual gardens, said that fragrant
roses brought from strange islands grew there—those strange islands
which are the romantic unexplored possibilities of God—and that
water-lilies shine like stars in that roaring torrent of supernal glory
which pours without ceasing through the transfigured soul. This is high
poetry; but sometimes the mystic imagination shows itself under simpler,
more endearing forms, as when St. Mechthild of Hackeborn saw the prayers
of her sisters flying up like larks into the presence of God; some
soaring as high as His countenance and some falling down to rest upon
His heart. An angel carried the little, fluttering prayers which were
not strong enough to rise of themselves. Imagery less charming than this
has gone to the making of many a successful poem.

Between the sublime intensity of St. John and the crystalline simplicity
of St. Mechthild, mystical literature provides us with examples of
almost every type of romantic and symbolic language; deliberate or
involuntary translation of the heavenly fact into the earthly image.
True, the earthly image is transfused by a new light, radiant with a new
colour, has been lifted into a new atmosphere; and thus has often a
suggestive quality far in excess of its symbolic appropriateness. In
their search for such images the mystics explore the resources of all
the arts. In particular, music and dancing—joyous harmony, unceasing
measured movement—have seemed to them specially significant _media_
whereby to express their intuitions of Eternal Life. St. Francis, and
after him Richard Rolle, heard celestial melodies; Kabir, the “Unstruck
Music of the Infinite.” Dante saw the saints dancing in the sphere of
the sun; Suso heard the music of the angels, and was invited to join in
their song and dance. It was not, he says, like the dancing of this
world, but was like a celestial ebb and flow within that
incomprehensible Abyss which is the secret being of the Deity. There is
no need to dwell upon the remarkable way in which mystics of all
countries and periods, from Plotinus to Jacob Boehme, resort to the
dance as an image of the glad harmonious movements of liberated souls. I
will take two characteristic examples, from the East and from the West.
The first is a poem by Kabir:

    “Dance, my heart! dance to-day with joy.
    The strains of love fill the days and the nights with music, and the
       world is listening to its melodies;
    Mad with joy, life and death dance to the rhythm of this music. The
       hills and the sea and the earth dance. The world of man dances in
       laughter and tears....
    Behold! my heart dances in the delight of a hundred arts, and the
       Creator is well pleased.”

The next is the German mystic and poetess, Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose
writings are amongst the finest products of mystical genius of the
romantic and emotional type. This Mechthild’s book, _The Book of the
Flowing Light of the Godhead_, is a collection of visions, revelations,
thoughts and letters, written in alternate prose and verse. The variety
of its contents includes the most practical advice on daily conduct, the
most sublime descriptions of high mystical experience. Mechthild was an
artist, who was evidently familiar with the literary tradition and most
of the literary expedients of her time. She uses many of them in the
attempt to impart to others that vision of Life, Light and Love which
she knew. I take, as an example of her genius, and a last specimen of
the mystic’s creative art, the celebrated letter addressed to a
fellow-pilgrim on that spiritual “Love-path” which she trod herself with
so great a fortitude. It represents not only the rich variety of
Mechthild’s literary resources, but also those several forms of artistic
expression which the great mystics have employed. Here, concrete
representation is perpetually reinforced by oblique suggestion; the
imagery of the poet is double-edged, evoking moods as well as ideas. We
observe that it opens with a spiritual love-scene, closely related in
style to the secular and romantic literature of Mechthild’s time; that
this develops to a dramatic dialogue between soul and senses—another
common artifice of the mediæval author—and this again leads by a
perfectly natural transition to the soul’s great acclamation of its
destiny, and the crowning announcement of the union of lover and
beloved.

The movement of this mystical romance, then, like the movement of
ascending consciousness, goes from the concrete image to the mysterious
and sidelong apprehension of imageless facts. First we have picture,
then dialectic, then intuitive certitude. Here, too, we find both those
aspects of experience which dominate mystical literature: the personal
and intimate encounter of love, and the self-loss of the soul in an
utterly transcendent Absolute. Surely the union of these “completing
opposites” in one work of art must rank as a great imaginative
achievement.

Mechthild tells her story of the soul’s adventure in snatches of
freely-rhymed verse, linked together by prose narrative passages—a form
which is not uncommon in the secular literature of the Middle Ages.[1]
We are further reminded of that secular literature by the imagery which
she employs. The soul is described as a maiden, the Divine Lover is a
fair youth whom she desires. The very setting of the story is just such
a fairy landscape as we find in the lays and romances of chivalry; it
has something of the spring-like charm that we feel in _Aucassin and
Nicolette_—the dewy morning, the bird-haunted forest, the song and
dance. It is, in fact, a love story of the period adapted with
extraordinary boldness to the purposes of mystical experience.

When the virgin soul, says Mechthild at the opening of her tale, has
endured all the trials of mystical purification, she is very weary, and
cries to her Love, saying, “Oh, beautiful youth! I long for thee. Where
shall I find thee?” Then the Divine Youth answers:

                 “A gentle voice I hear,
                 Something of love sounds there:
                 I have wooed her long and long,
                 Yet not till now have I heard that song.
                 It moveth me so,
                 Towards her I must go.
                 She is the soul who with pain is torn,
                 And love, that is one with the pain.
                 In the early dew of the morn,
                 In the hidden depths, which are far below,
                 The life of the soul is born.”

Then her vassals, which are the five senses, say to the soul, “Lady,
adorn thyself.”

                  “We have heard the whisper clear;
                  The Prince is coming towards thee here,
                  In the morning dew, in the bird’s song.
                  Ah, fair Bride, tarry not long!”

So the soul adorns herself with the virtues, and goes out into the
forest: and the forest, says Mechthild, is the company of the saints.
Sweet nightingales sing there night and day of true union with God, and
there in the thicket are heard the voices of the birds of holy wisdom.
But the youth himself comes not to her. He sends messengers to the
intent that she may dance: one by one he sends her the faith of Abraham,
the aspirations of the Prophets, the pure humility of our Lady Saint
Mary, all the virtues of Christ, and all the sanctity of His elect; and
thus there is prepared a most noble dance. And then comes the youth and
says to the soul, “Maiden, as gladly shouldst thou have danced, as mine
elect have danced.” But she replies:

          “Unless thou lead me, Lord, I cannot dance;
          Would’st thou have me leap and spring,
          Thou thyself, dear Lord, must sing,
          So shall I spring into thy love,
          From thy love to understanding,
          From understanding to delight.
          Then, soaring human thought far, far above,
          There circling will I dwell, and taste encircling love.”

So sings the Bride; and so the youth must sing, that she may dance. Then
says he:

“Maiden, thy dance of praise was well performed. Now thou shalt have thy
will of the Virgin’s Son, for thou art weary. Come at midday to the
shady fountain, to the resting-place of love: and with him thou shalt
find refreshment.”

And the maiden replies:

                   “Oh Lord, it is too high, too great,
                   That she should be thy chosen mate,
                   Within whose heart no love can be
                   Till she is quickened, Lord, by thee.”

By this romantic, story-telling method Mechthild has appealed to the
fancy and emotion of the reader, and has enticed him into the heart of
the spiritual situation. Next, she passes to her intellectual appeal;
the argument between the soul and the senses. From this she proceeds, by
a transition which seems to be free and natural, yet is the outcome of
consummate art, to the supreme declarations of the deified spirit “at
home with the Lord,” as St. Paul said.

The dialogue moves by the process of reduction to a demonstration of God
as the only satisfaction of the questing soul which has surrendered to
the incantations of Reality. One after another, substitutes for the
First and Only Fair are offered and rejected. The soul says to the
senses, which are her vassals: “Now I am for a while weary of the dance.
Give place! for I would go where I may refresh myself.” Then say the
senses to the soul: “Lady, wilt thou refresh thyself in the tears of
love of St. Mary Magdalene? This may well satisfy thee?” But the soul
says: “Hush, sirs, you know not what I mean! Let me be, for I would
drink a little of the unmingled wine.”

Then say the senses:

                  “Oh Bride, in virgin chastity,
                  Is the Love of God made ready for thee.”

And the soul says:

                 “Even so; yet though high and pure it be,
                 That path is not the highest for me.”

And the senses:

                 “In the blood of the martyred saints
                 May’st thou refresh thy soul that faints.”

And the soul:

                    “I have been martyred so many a day,
                    I cannot now tread in that way.”

And the senses:

                     “By the wise Confessors’ side,
                     The pure in heart love to abide.”

And the soul:

                     “And their counsel will I obey,
                     Both when I go and when I stay;
                     And yet I cannot walk their way.”

And the senses:

                      “In the Apostles’ wisdom pure,
                      May’st thou find a refuge sure.”

And the soul:

                   “I have their wisdom here in my heart,
                   And with it I choose the better part.”

And the senses:

            “O Bride, the angels are fair and bright,
            Full of God’s love, full of God’s light;
            Would’st thou refresh thee, mount to their height.”

And the soul:

               “The angel’s joy is but heartache to me,
               If their Lord and my Bridegroom I do not see.”

And the senses:

                  “In holy penance refresh thee and save,
                  That God to St. John Baptist gave.”

And the soul:

                “I am ready for pain, ready for grief,
                Yet the combat of love is first and chief.”

And the senses:

                 “O Bride, would’st thou refreshèd be,
                 So bend thee to the Virgin’s knee,
                 To the little Babe, and taste and see
                 The milk of joy from the Maid’s breast,
                 That the angels drink, in unearthly rest.”

And the soul:

                     “It is but a childish love indeed,
                     Babes to cradle, babes to feed;
                     I am a fair, a full-grown bride,
                     I must haste to my Lover’s side.”

And the senses:

                 “O bride, if thou goest thou shalt find,
                 That we are utterly dazzled and blind.
                 Such fiery heat in God doth dwell—
                 Thou thyself knowest it well—
                 That all the flame and all the glow
                 Which in Heaven above and the Saints below
                 Burneth and shineth—all doth flow
                 From God Himself. His divine breath
                 Sighed by the Spirit’s wisdom and power,
                 Through His human lips, born to death,
                 —Who may abide it, e’en for an hour?”

And the soul says:

         “The fish in the water cannot drown,
         The bird in the air cannot sink down,
         Gold in the fire cannot decay,
         But shineth fairer and clearer alway.
         To all creatures God doth give,
         After their own natures to live.
         How can I bind my nature’s wings?
         I must haste to my God before all things;
         My God, by His nature my Father above,
           My Brother in His humanity,
         My Bridegroom in His ardent love,
           And I His from Eternity.
         Think ye, that Fire must utterly slay my soul?
         Nay—fierce He can scorch—then tenderly cool and console.”

“And so did the utterly loved go in to the utterly lovely; into the
secret chamber of the Pure Divinity. And there she found the resting
place of love, and the home of love, and the Divine Humanity that
awaited her.”

And the soul said:

               “Lord, God, I am now a naked soul
               And Thou art arrayed all gloriously:
               We are Two in One, we have reached the goal,
               Immortal rapture that cannot die.
               Now, a blessed silence doth o’er us flow,
               Both wills together would have it so.
               He is given to her, she is given to Him,—
               What now shall befall her, the soul doth know—
               And therefore am I consoled.”

This is the end of all mysticism. It is the term to which all the
artistic efforts of the mystics have striven to lead the hearts of other
men.

Footnote 1:

  For the verse-translations in the following extracts I am indebted to
  the great skill and kindness of Mrs. Theodore Beck, who, possessing a
  special talent for this difficult art, has most generously made for me
  these versions of Mechthild’s poetry.




                      THE EDUCATION OF THE SPIRIT


The old mystics were fond of saying that “Man is a made trinity, like to
the unmade Blessed Trinity.” That particular form of words comes to us
from Julian of Norwich; but it expresses a thought which we often meet
in the spiritual writers of the Middle Ages. Further, these writers were
disposed to find in man’s nature a reflection of the three special
characters which theology attributes to the Christian Godhead. They
thought that the power of the Father had its image in the physical
nature of man: the wisdom of the Son in his reason: the creative vigour
of the Holy Spirit in his soul. Some taught also that each of these
three aspects of humanity corresponded with one aspect of the triune
reality of the universe: the physical world of nature, the mental world
of idea, the ultimate world of spirit. The sceptic of course would
express this differently, and see in it but one more illustration of the
fact that man always makes God in his own image. But without scepticism
I think we may explain it thus: that those who have pondered most deeply
on the Divine Nature have most easily found in its richness, and have
best understood, just those attributes which are most clearly marked in
human nature. Man has inevitably been for them a key to God.

These speculations seem at first sight to have little bearing upon the
problems of education. But they are in reality intimately connected with
it: for their consideration leads us back to the central fact out of
which they have arisen—namely, the abiding truth that man’s deepest
exploration of his own nature gives again and again this threefold
result, that he feels that his real self-hood and real possibilities are
not wholly exhausted by the terms “body” and “mind.” He knows in his
best moments another vivid aspect of his being, as strong as these,
though often kept below the threshold of his consciousness: the spirit,
which informs, yet is distinct from both his body and his mind.

Now the question which all serious educationalists are called upon to
ask themselves is this: To what extent does that three-fold analysis of
human personality influence our educational schemes? The object of
education is to bring out the best and highest powers of the thing
educated. Do we, in our education, even attempt to bring out the best
and highest powers of the spirit, as we seek to develop those of the
body and the mind?

The child as he comes to us is a bundle of physical, mental, and
spiritual possibilities. He is related to three distinct yet
interpenetrating worlds; all accessible to him, since he is human, and
all offering endless opportunities of adventure to him.

                 “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,
                 Shades of the prison-house begin to close
                 About the growing boy.”

Why should they close; whose fault is it that they do? Does not the
fault lie with the poor and grovelling outlook of those to whom this
sensitive, plastic thing is confided? Who so badly select and manipulate
the bundle of possibilities offered to them, that they often contrive to
manufacture a creature ruled by its own physical needs and appetites,
its mental and emotional limitations; instead of a free, immortal being,
master of its own body and mind. Here is this child, the germ of the
future. To a great extent, we can control the way that germ develops;
the special characters of the past which it shall transmit. We can have
a hand in the shaping of the history that is to be when we have gone:
for who can doubt that the controlling factor of history is the
physical, mental, or spiritual character of those races that dominate
the world? It is in the interplay, tension, and strife of these three
universes that history in the last resort consists.

Now, on the eve of a new era, is it not worth while to remind ourselves
of this terrific fact? To see whether our plans are so laid as to bring
out all the balanced possibilities of the coming man; all his latent
powers? We recognize the fact that body and mind must be trained whilst
still in a plastic state. We are awake to the results of allowing them
to atrophy. Where we find individuals with special powers in one of
these directions, we aim at their perfect development; at the production
of the athlete, scholar, man of action. But it cannot be said that we
are equally on the lookout for special qualities of spirit; that when
found, we train them with the same skill and care. Yet if we do not, can
we expect to get the very best out of the race? To explore all its
potentialities; some, perhaps, still unguessed? We know that the child’s
reactions to life will be determined by the mental furniture with which
he is equipped. His perceptions, his choice from among the welter of
possible impressions surrounding him, will depend on the character of
his “apperceiving mass.” Surely then it is our first duty so to equip
him that he shall be able to lay hold on those intimations of spirit
which are woven into the texture of our sensual universe; to lead him
into that mood of receptivity in which the beautiful and the
significant, the good and the true, stand out for him from the scene of
life and hold his interest. A meadow which to one boy is merely a
possible cricket field, to another is a place of romance and adventure,
full of friendly life.

The mischief is that whatever our theoretic beliefs, we do not in
practice really regard spirit as the chief element of our being; the
chief object of our educational care. Our notions about it are shadowy,
and have very little influence on our educational schemes. Were it
present to us as a vivid reality, we should surely provide our young
people with a reasoned philosophy of life in which it is given its
place: something which can provide honest answers to the questions of
the awakening intelligence, and withstand the hostile criticism which
wrecks so much adolescent faith. For ten parents who study the
Montessori system of sense training, how many think of consulting those
old specialists who taught how the powers of the spirit may be developed
and disciplined, and given their true place in human life? How many
educationalists realize that prayer, as taught to children, may and
should be an exercise which gently develops a whole side of human
consciousness that might otherwise be dormant; places it in
communication with a real and valid universe awaiting the apprehension
of man? How many give the subject the same close, skilled attention that
they give, say, to Latin grammar on one hand or physical culture on the
other? Those subjects, and many more, have emerged from vagueness into
clarity because attention, the cutting point of the human will, has been
concentrated upon them. Gradually in these departments an ordered world
has been made, and the child or young person put in correspondence with
that world. We cannot say that the same has been done for the world of
spirit. The majority of the “well-educated” probably pass through life
without any knowledge of the science of prayer, with at best the vaguest
notions of the hygiene of the soul. Often our religious teachers are
themselves no better instructed, and seem unable to offer the growing
and hungry spirit any food more heavenly than practical ethics and
dogmatic beliefs. Thus a complete world of experience is habitually
ignored by us, and one great power of the human trinity allowed to
atrophy.

We are just beginning as educators to pay ordered attention to that
fringe-world in which sense, intellect, and spirit all have a part: I
mean the world of æsthetic apprehension. It cannot be denied that the
result has been, for many of the young people now growing up, an immense
enlargement and enrichment of life. Look at one of the most striking
intellectual characteristics of the last few years: the rapid growth of
the taste and need for poetry, the amount of it that is written, the way
in which it seems to supply a necessary outlet for young Englishmen in
the present day. Look at the mass of verse which was composed, under
conditions of utmost horror, on the battlefields; poetry the most
pathetic in the world, in which we see the passionate effort of spirit
to find adjustment, its assertion of unconquerable power, even in the
teeth of this overwhelming manifestation of brute force. There is the
power of the future: the spirit of beauty and truth seeking for
utterance. There is that quickening spring, bubbling up afresh in every
generation; and ready, if we will help it to find expression, to
transfigure our human life.

There is a common idea that the spiritual life means something pious and
mawkish: not very desirable in girls, and most objectionable in boys. It
is strange that this notion, which both the Jewish and Christian
Scriptures so emphatically contradict, should ever have grown up amongst
us. The spirit, says St. Paul, is not a spirit of fearfulness; it is “a
spirit of Power and Love and Discipline”—qualities that make for vigour
and manliness of the best type. It is the very source of our energies,
both natural and supernatural. The mystics sometimes called it our
“life-giving life,” and modern psychologists are beginning to discover
that it is, in the most literal sense, our “health’s eternal spring.”
People say, “Come, Holy Spirit”; as if it were something foreign to us:
yet it comes perpetually in every baby born into the world, for each new
human life entering the temporal order implies a new influx or, least, a
new manifestation of spirit. But, when spirit is thus wedded to mind and
body to form human nature, it is submitted to the law governing human
nature: the law of freedom. It is ours, to develop or stunt as we
please. Its mighty powers are not pressed on an unwilling race, but
given us in germ to deal with as we will. Parents are responsible for
giving it every opportunity of development, the food, the light, the
nurture that all growing things require—in fact, for its education: a
great honour, and a great responsibility.

If we are asked wherein such education should consist, I think we must
reply that its demands are not satisfied by teaching the child any
series of religious doctrines divorced from practical experience. He is
full of energies demanding expression. Our object is so to train those
energies that they shall attain their full power and right balance; and
enable him to set up relations with the spiritual world in which he
truly lives. The first phase in this education will consist in a
definite moral training, which is like the tilling and preparation of
the earth in which the spiritual plant is to grow: and as regarding the
special objects of this training I will take the definition of a great
spiritual writer, a definition remarkable for its sanity and moderation:
“If we would discover and know that Kingdom of God which is hidden in
us, we must lead a life that is virtuous within, well ordered without,
and fulfilled with true charity.” What does that imply? It implies the
cultivation of self-control, order, and disinterestedness. Order is a
quality which all spiritual writers hold in great esteem; for they are
far from being the ecstatic, unbalanced, and mood-ridden creatures of
popular fancy. Now the untrained child has all the disorderly ways, the
uncontrolled and self-interested instincts of the primitive man. He is a
vigorous young animal, reacting promptly and completely to the stimulus
of fear or of greed. The history of human society, the gradual exchange
of license for law, self-interest for group-interest, spasmodic activity
for orderly diligence must be repeated in him if he is to take his place
in that human society. But if we would also prepare in him the way of
spirit, the aim of this training must be something higher than that
convenient social morality, that spirit of fair play, truth, justice,
mutual tolerance, which public school discipline seeks to develop. That
morality is relative and utilitarian. The morality in which alone the
life of the spirit can flourish is absolute and ideal. It is sought, not
because it makes life secure, or promotes the greatest happiness of the
greatest number, but for its own sake. Yet in spite of this, the social
order, in the form in which the child comes in contact with it, may be
made one of the best instruments for producing those characters demanded
by the spiritual life. For what, after all, is the exchanging of
self-interest for group-interests but the beginning of love? And what is
at the root of the spirit of give and take but humility? See how the
approaches to the spiritual kingdom are found in the midst of the common
life: what easy opportunity we have of initiating our children into
these central virtues of the soul. The spiritual writers tell us that
from love and humility all other virtues come; that on the moral side
nothing else is required of us. And we, if we train wisely, may lead the
young into them so gently and yet so deeply that their instinctive
attitude to existence will be that of humbleness and love; and they will
be spared the conflict and difficult reformation of those who wake to
spiritual realities in later life.

Now humbleness and love, as understood by spiritual persons, are not
passive virtues: they are energetic, and show themselves in mind, will,
and heart. In the mind, by a constant desirous tendency to, and seeking
after, that which is best; in the will by keenness, or, as the mystics
would say, by diligence and zeal; in the heart, by an easy suppleness of
relation with our fellow men—patience, good temper, sympathy,
generosity. Plainly the moral character which makes for spirituality is
a moral character which also makes for happiness. Suppose, then, that
our moral training has been directed towards this eager, supple state of
humbleness and love: what special results may we expect as the
personality develops? Spiritual writers tell us to expect certain
qualities, which are traditionally called the “seven gifts of the
spirit”; and if we study the special nature of these gifts, we see that
they are the names of linked characters or powers, which together work
an enhancement and clarification of the whole personality—a tuning-up of
human nature to fresh levels, a sublimation of its primitive instincts.
The first pair of qualities which are to mark our spiritual humanity are
called Godliness and Fear. By these are meant that solemn sense of
direct relationship with an eternal order, that gravity and awe, which
we ought to feel in the presence of the mysteries of the universe; the
fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom. From these grow the
gifts called Knowledge, that is, the power of discerning true from false
values, of choosing a good path through the tangled world, and Strength,
the steady central control of the diverse forces of the self: perhaps
the gift most needed by our distracted generation. “Through the gift of
spiritual strength,” says Ruysbroeck, “a man transcends all creaturely
things and possesses himself, powerful and free.” This is surely a power
which we should desire for the children of the future, and get for them
if we can.

We see that the first four gifts of the spirit will govern the
adjustment of man to his earthly life: that they will immensely increase
the value of his personality in the social order, will clarify his mind
and judgment, confer nobility on his aims. The last three gifts—those
called Counsel, Understanding and Wisdom—will govern his intercourse
with the spiritual order. By Counsel, the spiritual writers mean that
inward voice which, as the soul matures, urges us to leave the
transitory and seek the eternal: and this not as an act of duty, but as
an act of love. When that voice is obeyed, the result is a new spiritual
Understanding; which, says Ruysbroeck again, may be “likened to the
sunshine, which fills the air with a simple brightness, and lights all
forms and shows the distinctions of all colours.” Even so does this
spiritual gift irradiate the whole world with a new splendour, and shows
us secrets that we never guessed before. Poets know flashes of it, and
from it their power proceeds; for it enables its possessor to behold
life truly, that is from the angle of God, not from the angle of man.

“Such an one,” says Ruysbroeck, “walks in heaven, and beholds and
apprehends the height, the length, the depth, and the breadth, the
wisdom and truth, the bounty and unspeakable generosity, which are in
God our Lover without number and without limit; for all this is Himself.
Then that enlightened man looks down, and beholds himself and all other
men and all creatures; and this gift, through the knowledge of truth
which is given us in its light, establishes in us a wide-stretching love
towards all in common.”

“A wide-stretching love towards all in common.” When we think of this as
the ruling character of our future citizens, and so the ruling character
of our future world, we begin to see that the education of the spirit
may represent a political no less than a transcendental ideal. It alone
can bring about that regeneration, working from the heart outwards, of
which the prophets of every country have dreamed.

It seems hard to conceive anything beyond this. But there is something.
To behold things as they are is not the end: beyond this is that Wisdom
which comes not with observation, but is the fruit of intimate communion
with Reality. Understanding is perception raised to its highest
expression: Wisdom is intuition raised to its highest expression, and
directed towards an absolute objective. It is, so far as we know here,
the crown and goal of human development; the perfect fruition of love.

We have considered very shortly the chief possibilities of the human
spirit, as they are described by those who have looked most deeply into
its secrets. These seers tell us further that this spirit has its
definite course to run, its definite consummation: that it emerges
within the physical order, grows, spreads, and at last enters into
perfect union or communion with the real and spiritual world. How much
attention do we pay to this statement, which, if true, is the
transcendent fact of human history, the key to the nature of man? How
much real influence does it have on our hopes and plans for our
children? The so-called phenomenon of conversion—the fact that so far
nearly all the highest and best examples of the spiritual life have been
twice-born types, that they have had to pass through a terrible crisis,
in which their natural lives were thrown into confusion in order that
their spiritual lives might emerge—all this is really a confession of
failure on the part of human nature: a proof that the plastic creature
has been allowed to harden in the wrong shape. If our growth were
rightly directed, the spirit would emerge and flower in all its strength
and loveliness, as the physical and mental powers of normal children
emerge and flower. What is wrong with education that it fails to achieve
this? Partly, I think, that the values at which it aims are too often
relative and self-interested; not absolute and disinterested. Its
intelligent gaze is fixed too steadily on earthly society, earthly
happiness. We encourage our young people to do the best things, but not
always from the best motives. We forget the essential link between work
and prayer: yet this alone lifts man from the position of a busy animal
to that of the friend and helper of God. We forget that our duties ought
to include the awakening of that clear consciousness of eternity which
should be normal in every human being, and without which it is
impossible for any man to grasp the true values and true proportion of
life.

From the very beginning, then, we ought to raise the eyes of the young
from the contemplation of the earth under their feet to that of the
heavens above their heads: to give them absolute values, not utilitarian
values, to aim at. There is nothing morbid or sickly in this: it is
rather those who do not possess the broader consciousness who are the
morbid, the sickly, and the maimed. The hope of the future is wide. We
must train our children to a wide stretch of faith, of aim, of
imagination, if they are to grasp it, and fully enter into the
inheritance that awaits them.

How, then, should we begin this most delicate of all tasks; this
education of the most sacred and subtle aspect of human nature? We must
be careful; for difficulties and dangers crowd the path, cranks lie in
wait at every corner. I have spoken of the moral preparation. That is
always safe and sure. But there are two other safe ways of approach; the
devotional and æsthetic. These two ways are not alternative, but
complementary. Art, says Hegel, belongs to the highest sphere of spirit,
and is to be placed in respect of its content on the same footing as
religion and philosophy; and many others—seers and philosophers—have
found in the revelation of beauty an authentic witness to God. But the
love and realization of beauty, without reverence and devotion, soon
degenerates into mere pleasure. So, too, devotion, unless informed with
the spirit of beauty, becomes thin, hard and sterile. But where these
two exist together, we find on one hand that the developed apprehension
which discovers deep messages in nature, in music, in all the noble
rhythms of art, makes the senses themselves into channels of Spirit: and
this is an apprehension which we can foster and control. And on the
other hand the devotional life, rightly understood as a vivid, joyful
thing—with that disciplining of the attention and will which is such an
important part of it—is the most direct way to an attainment of that
simple and natural consciousness of our intangible spiritual environment
which all ought to possess, and which the old mystics called by the
beautiful name of the “practice of the Presence of God.”

This linking up of the devotional life with the instinct for beauty and
wonder, will check its concentration on the more sentimental and
anthropomorphic aspects of religion; and so discourage that religious
emotionalism which wise educationalists rightly condemn. Hence these two
ways of approach, merged as they should be into one, can bring the self
into that simple kind of contemplation which is a normal birthright of
every soul, but of which our defective education deprives so many men
and women; who cannot in later life quicken those faculties which have
been left undeveloped in youth. As logic is a supreme exercise of the
mind, so contemplation is a supreme exercise of the spirit: it
represents the full activity of that intuitional faculty which is our
medium of contact with absolute truth. Before the inevitable smile
appears on the face of the reader, I say at once that I am not
suggesting that we should teach young children contemplation; though I
am sure that many brought up in a favouring atmosphere naturally
practise it long before they know the meaning of the word. But I do
suggest that we should bring them up in such a way that their developed
spirits might in the end acquire this art, without any more sense of
break with the normal than that which is felt by the developed mind when
it acquires the art of logic.

What is contemplation? It is attention to the things of the spirit:
surely no outlandish or alarming practice, foreign to the general drift
of human life. Were we true to our own beliefs, it should rather be our
central and supremely natural activity; the way in which we turn to the
spiritual world, and pick up the messages it sends to us. That world is
always sending us messages of liberation, of hope, and of peace. Are we
going to deprive our children of this unmeasured heritage, this
extension of life—perhaps the greatest of the rights of man—or leave
their enjoyment of it to some happy chance? We cannot read the wonderful
records of the spiritually awakened without a sense of the duty that is
laid on us, to develop if we can this spiritual consciousness in the
generation that is to be.

All great spiritual literature is full of invitations to a newness of
life, a great change of direction; which shall at last give our human
faculties a worthy objective and redeem our consciousness from its
present concentration upon unreal interests. It urges us perpetually, as
a practical counsel, as something which is within human power and has
already been achieved by the heroes of the race, to “put on the new
man”; to “bring to birth the Son of God in the soul.” But humanity as a
whole has never responded to that invitation, and therefore its greatest
possibilities are still latent. We, the guardians of the future, by
furnishing to each emerging consciousness committed to our care such an
apperceiving mass as shall enable it to discern the messages of reality,
may do something to bring those possibilities into manifestation.




           THE PLACE OF WILL, INTELLECT AND FEELING IN PRAYER


The psychology of religious experience, as yet so little understood, has
few more important problems proposed to it than that which concerns the
true place and right use of will, intellect, and feeling in prayer. This
question, which to some may appear merely academic, really involves the
whole problem of the method and proportion in which the various powers
and activities of our being may best be used, when they turn from the
natural world of concrete things to attend to the so-called
“supernatural” world of Spirit—in fact, to God, Who is the source and
sum of the reality of that world. That problem must be of practical
interest to every Christian—more, to every one who believes in the
spiritual possibilities of man—for it concerns itself with all those
responses which are made by human personality to the impact of Infinite
Life. It deals, in Maeterlinck’s words, with “the harshest and most
uninhabitable headlands of the Divine ‘know thyself,’” and includes in
its span the whole region “where the psychology of man mingles with the
psychology of God.”

In the first place, what do we mean by prayer? Surely just this: that
part of our active and conscious life which is deliberately orientated
towards, and exclusively responds to, spiritual reality. The Being of
God, Who is that spiritual reality, we believe to be immanent in all
things: “He is not far from each one of us: for in Him we live, and
move, and have our being.” In fact, as Christians we must believe this.
Therefore in attending to those visible and concrete things, we are in a
way attending to that immanent God; and in this sense all honest work is
indeed, as the old proverb says, a sort of prayer. But when we speak of
prayer as a separate act or activity of the self, we mean more than
this. We mean, in fact, as a rule the other aspect of spiritual
experience and communion; in the language of theology, attention to
transcendent rather than to immanent Reality. Prayer, says Walter
Hilton, in terms of which the origin goes back to the Neoplatonists, “is
nothing else but an ascending or getting up of the desire of the heart
into God, by withdrawing it from all earthly thoughts”—an ascent, says
Ruysbroeck, of the Ladder of Love. In the same spirit William Law
defines it as “the rising of the soul out of the vanity of time into the
riches of eternity.” It entails, then, a going up or out from our
ordinary circle of earthly interests; a cutting off, so far as we may,
of “the torrent of use and wont,” that we may attend to the changeless
Reality which that flux too often hides. Prayer stretches out the
tentacles of our consciousness not so much towards that Divine Life
which is felt to be enshrined within the striving, changeful world of
things; but rather to that “Eternal truth, true Love, and loved
Eternity” wherein the world is felt to be enshrined; and in this act it
brings to full circle the activities of the human soul—that

                        “Swinging-wicket set between
                        The Unseen and the Seen.”

The whole of man’s life really consists in a series of balanced
responses to this Transcendent-Immanent Reality; because man lives under
two orders, is at once a citizen of Eternity and of Time. Like a
pendulum, his consciousness moves perpetually—or should move if it be
healthy—between God and his neighbour, between this world and that. The
wholeness, sanity, and balance of his existence will entirely depend
upon the perfection of his adjustment to this double situation; on the
steady alternating beat of his outward swing of adoration, his
homeward-turning swing of charity. Now, it is the outward swing which we
are to consider: the powers that may be used in it, the best way in
which these powers may be employed.

First, we observe that those three capacities or faculties which we have
under consideration—the thinking faculty, the feeling faculty, the
willing or acting faculty—practically cover all the ways in which the
self can react to other selves and other things. From their combination
come all the possibilities of self-expression which are open to man. In
his natural life he needs and uses all of them. Shall he need and use
all of them in his spiritual life too? Christians, I think, are bound to
answer this question in the affirmative. According to Christianity, it
is the whole self which is called to turn towards Divine Reality—to
enter the Kingdom—not some supposed “spiritual” part thereof. “Thou hast
made us for Thyself,” said Augustine; not, as the Orphic initiate would
have said, “Thou hast made one crumb out of our complex nature for
Thyself, and the rest may go on to the rubbish heap.” It is the _whole
man_ of intellect, of feeling, and of will, which finds its only true
objective in the Christian God.

Surely, the real difference which marks out Christianity from all other
religions lies just here; in this robust acceptance of humanity in its
wholeness, and of life in its completeness, as something which is
susceptible of the Divine. It demands, and deals with, the whole man,
his Titanic energies and warring instincts; not, as did the antique
mysteries, separating and cultivating some supposed transcendental
principle in him, to the exclusion of all else. Christians believe in a
God immanent and incarnate, Who transfuses the whole of the life which
He has created, and calls that life in its wholeness to union with Him.
If this be so, then _Lex credendi, lex orandi_; our belief should find
its fullest expression in our prayer, and that prayer should take up,
and turn towards the spiritual order all the powers of our mental,
emotional, and volitional life. Prayer should be the highest exercise of
these powers; for here they are directed to the only adequate object of
thought, of love, and of desire. It should, as it were, lift us to the
top of our condition, and represent the fullest flowering of our
consciousness; for here we breathe the air of the supernal order, and
attain according to our measure to that communion with Reality for which
we were made.

Prayer so thought of will include, of course, many different kinds of
spiritual work; and also—what is too often forgotten—the priceless gift
of spiritual rest. It will include many kinds of intercourse with
Reality—adoration, petition, meditation, contemplation—and all the
shades and varieties of these which religious writers have named and
classified. As in the natural order the living creature must feed _and_
grow, must suffer _and_ enjoy, must get energy from the external world
_and_ give it back again in creative acts, if he would live a whole and
healthy life, so, too, in the spiritual order. All these things—the
giving and the receiving, the work and the rest—should fall within the
circle of prayer.

Now, when we do anything consciously and with purpose, the transition
from inaction to action unfolds itself in a certain order. First we form
a concept of that which we shall do; the idea of it looms up, dimly or
distinctly, in the mind. Then, we feel that we want to do it, or must do
it. Then we determine that we _will_ do it. These phases may follow one
another so swiftly that they seem to us to be fused into one; but when
we analyze the process which lies behind each conscious act, we find
that this is the normal sequence of development. First we think, then we
feel, then we will. This little generalization must not be pressed too
hard; but it is broadly true, and gives us a starting-point from which
to trace out the way in which the three main powers of the self act in
prayer. It is practically important, as well as psychologically
interesting, to know how they act or should act; as it is practically
important to know, at least in outline, the normal operation of our
bodily powers. Self-knowledge, said Richard of St. Victor, is the
beginning of the spiritual life; and knowledge of ones self—too often
identified with knowledge of ones sins—ought to include some slight
acquaintance with the machinery we all have at our disposal. This
machinery, as we see, falls into three divisions; and the perfection of
the work which it does will depend upon the observing of an order in
their operation, a due balance between them, without excessive
development of one power at the expense of the others.

On the side of spiritual experience and activity, such an excessive and
one-sided development often takes place. Where this exaggeration is in
the direction of intellect, the theological or philosophical mood
dominates all other aspects of religion. Where the purely emotional and
instinctive side of the relation of the soul to God is released from the
critical action of the intelligence, it often degenerates into an
objectionable sentimentality, and may lead to forms of self-indulgence
which are only superficially religious. Where the volitional element
takes command, unchecked by humble love, an arrogant reliance upon our
own powers, a restless determination to do certain hard things, to
attain certain results—a sort of super-sensual ambition—mars the harmony
of the inner life. Any of these exaggerations must mean loss of balance,
loss of wholeness; and their presence in the active life reflects back
to their presence in the prayerful life, of which outward religion is
but the visible sign. I think, therefore, that we ought to regard it as
a part of our religious education to study the order in which our
faculties should be employed when we turn towards our spiritual
inheritance.

Prayer, as a rule—save with those natural or highly trained
contemplatives who live always in the prayerful state, tuned up to a
perpetual consciousness of spiritual reality—begins, or should begin,
with something which we can only call an intellectual act; with thinking
of what we are going to do. In saying this, I am not expressing a merely
personal opinion. All those great specialists of the spiritual life who
have written on this subject are here in agreement. “When thou goest
about to pray,” says Walter Hilton, “first make and frame betwixt thee
and God a full purpose and intention; then begin, and do as well as thou
canst.” “Prayer,” says the writer of the _Cloud of Unknowing_, “may not
goodly be gotten in beginners or proficients, without thinking coming
before.” All mediæval writers on prayer take it as a matter of course
that “meditation” comes before “orison”; and meditation is simply the
art of thinking steadily and methodically about spiritual things. So,
too, the most modern psychologists assure us that instinctive emotion
does its best work when it acts in harmony with our reasoning powers.

St. Teresa, again, insists passionately on the primal need of thinking
what we are doing when we begin to pray; on “recollecting the mind,”
calling in the scattered thoughts, and concentrating the intellect upon
the business in hand. It is, in fact, obvious—once we consider the
matter in a practical light—that we must form _some_ conception of the
supernal intercourse which we are going to attempt, and of the parties
to it; though if our prayer be real, that conception will soon be
transcended. The sword of the spirit is about to turn in a new
direction; away from concrete actualities, towards eternal realities.
This change—the greatest of which our consciousness is capable—must be
realized as fully as possible by the self whose powers of will and love
it will call into play. It seems necessary to insist on this point,
because so much is said now, and no doubt rightly said, about the
non-intellectual and supremely intuitional nature of the spiritual life;
with the result that some people begin to think it their duty to
cultivate a kind of pious imbecility. There is a notion in the air that
when man turns to God he ought to leave his brains behind him. True,
they will soon be left behind of necessity if man goes far on the road
towards that Reality which is above all reason and all knowledge; for
spirit in the swiftness of its flight to God quickly overpasses these
imperfect instruments. But those whose feet are still firmly planted
upon earth gain nothing by anticipating this moment; they will not
attain to spiritual intuition by the mere annihilation of their
intelligence. We cannot hope to imitate the crystalline simplicity of
the saints; a simplicity which is the result, not of any deliberate
neglect of reason, but of clearest vision, of intensest trust, of most
ardent love—that is, of Faith, Hope, and Charity in their most perfect
expression, fused together to form a single state of enormous activity.
But this is no reason why we should put imbecility, deliberate
vagueness, or a silly want of logic in the place of their exquisite
simpleness; any more than we should dare to put an unctuous familiarity
in the place of their wonderful intimacy, or a cringing demeanour in the
place of their matchless humility.

In saying this—in insisting that the reason has a well-marked and
necessary place in the mechanism of the soul’s approach to God—I am not
advocating a religious intellectualism. It is true that our perception
of all things, even the most divine, is conditioned by the previous
content of our minds: the “apperceiving mass.” Hence, the more worthy
our thoughts about God, the more worthy our apprehensions of Him are
likely to be. Yet I know that there is in the most apparently foolish
prayer of feeling something warmly human, and therefore effective;
something which in its value for life far transcends the consecrated
sawdust offered up by devout intellectualism. “By love,” said the old
mystic, “He may be gotten and holden; by thought never.” A whole world
of experience separates the simple little church mouse saying her
rosary, perhaps without much intelligence, yet with a humble and a
loving faith, from the bishop who preferred “Oh, Great First Cause” to
“Our Father,” because he thought that it was more in accordance with
scientific truth; and few of us will feel much doubt as to the side on
which the advantage lies. The advantage must always lie with those “full
true sisters,” humility and love; for these are the essential elements
of all successful prayer. But surely it is a mistake to suppose that
these qualities cannot exist side by side with an active and disciplined
intelligence?

Prayer, then, begins by an intellectual adjustment. By thinking of God,
or of Spiritual Reality, earnestly and humbly, and to the exclusion of
other objects of thought; by deliberately surrendering the mind to
spiritual things; by preparing the consciousness for the impact of a new
order, the inflow of new life. But, having thought of God, the self, if
it stop there, is no more in touch with Him than it was before. It may
think as long as it likes, but nothing happens; thought unhelped by
feeling ever remains exterior to its object. We are brought up short
against the fact that the intellect is an essentially static thing: we
cannot think our way along the royal road which leads to heaven.

Yet it is a commonplace of spiritual knowledge that, if the state of
prayer be established, something does happen; consciousness does somehow
travel along that road, the field of perception is shifted, new contacts
are made. How is this done? A distinguished religious psychologist has
answered, that it is done “by the synthesis of love and will”—that is to
say, by the craving in action which conditions all our essential
deeds—and I know no better answer to suggest.

Where the office of thought ends, there the office of will and feeling
begins: “Where intellect must stay without,” says Ruysbroeck, “these may
enter in.” Desire and intention are the most dynamic of our faculties;
they do work. They are the true explorers of the Infinite, the
instruments of our ascents to God. Reason comes to the foot of the
mountain; it is the industrious will urged by the passionate heart which
climbs the slope. It is the “blind intent stretching towards Him,” says
the _Cloud of Unknowing_, “the true lovely will of the heart,” which
succeeds at last; the tense determination, the effort, the hard work,
the definite, eager, humble, outward thrust of the whole personality
towards a Reality which is felt rather than known. “We are nothing else
but wills,” said St. Augustine. “The will,” said William Law, “maketh
the beginning, the middle, and the end of everything. It is the only
workman in nature, and everything is its work.” Experience endorses this
emphasis on will and desire as the central facts of our personality, the
part of us which is supremely our own. In turning that will and desire
towards Spiritual Reality, we are doing all that we can of ourselves;
are selecting one out of the sheaf-like tendencies of our complex
nature, and deliberately concentrating upon it our passion and our
power. Also, we are giving consciously, whole-heartedly, with intention,
that with which we are free to deal; and self-donation is, we know, an
essential part of prayer, as of all true intercourse.

Now, intellect and feeling are not wholly ours to give. A rich mental or
emotional life is not possessed of all men; some are naturally stupid,
some temperamentally cold. Even those who are greatly endowed with the
powers of understanding or of love have not got these powers entirely
under their own control. Both feeling and intellect often insist on
taking their own line with us. Moreover, they fluctuate from day to day,
from hour to hour; they are dependent on many delicate adjustments.
Sometimes we are mentally dull, sometimes we are emotionally flat: and
this happens more often, perhaps, in regard to spiritual than in regard
to merely human affairs. On such occasions it is notoriously useless to
try to beat ourselves up to a froth: to make ourselves think more deeply
or make ourselves care more intensely. Did the worth of man’s prayerful
life depend on the maintenance of a constant high level of feeling or
understanding, he were in a parlous case. But, though these often seem
to fail him—and with them all the joy of spiritual intercourse fails him
too—the regnant will remains. Even when his heart is cold and his mind
is dim, the “blind intent stretching to God” is still possible to him.
“Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.”

The Kingdom of Heaven, says the Gospel, is taken by violence—that is, by
effort, by unfaltering courage—not by cleverness, nor by ecstatic
spiritual feelings. The freedom of the City of God is never earned by a
mere limp acquiescence in those great currents of the transcendent order
which bear life towards its home. The determined fixing of the will upon
Spiritual Reality, and pressing towards that Reality steadily and
without deflection; this is the very centre of the art of prayer. This
is why those splendid psychologists, the mediæval writers on prayer,
told their pupils to “mean only God,” and not to trouble about anything
else; since “He who has Him has all.” The most theological of thoughts
soon becomes inadequate; the most spiritual of emotions is only a
fair-weather breeze. Let the ship take advantage of it by all means, but
not rely on it. She must be prepared to beat to windward if she would
reach her goal.

In proportion to the strength and sincerity of the will, in fact, so
shall be the measure of success in prayer. As the self pushes out
towards Reality, so does Reality rush in on it. “Grace and the will,”
says one of the greatest of living writers on religion, “rise and fall
together.” “Grace” is, of course, the theological term for that inflow
of spiritual vitality which is the response made by the divine order to
the human motions of adoration, supplication, and love; and according to
the energy and intensity with which our efforts are made—the degree in
which we concentrate our attention upon this high and difficult business
of prayer—will be the amount of new life that we receive. The efficacy
of prayer, therefore, will be conditioned by the will of the praying
self. “Though it be so, that prayer be not the cause of grace,” says
Hilton, “nevertheless it is a way or means by which grace freely given
comes into the soul.” Grace presses in upon life perpetually, and awaits
our voluntary appropriation of it. It is accessible to sincere and loyal
endeavour, to “the true lovely will of the heart,” and to nothing else.

So much we have said of will. What place have we left for the operation
of feeling in prayer? It is not easy to disentangle will and feeling;
for in all intense will there is a strong element of emotion—every
volitional act has somewhere at the back of it a desire—and in all great
and energizing passions there is a pronounced volitional element. The
“synthesis of love and will” is no mere fancy of the psychologist. It is
a compound hard to break down in practice. But I think we can say
generally that the business of feeling is to inflame the will, to give
it intention, gladness, and vividness; to convert it from a dull
determination into an eager, impassioned desire. It links up thought
with action; effects, in psychological language, the movement of the
prayerful self from a mere state of cognition to a state of conation;
converts the soul from attention to the Transcendent to first-hand
adventure within it. “All thy life now behoveth altogether to stand in
desire,” says the author of the _Cloud of Unknowing_ to the disciple who
has accepted the principle of prayer; and here he is declaring a
psychological necessity rather than a religious platitude, for all
successful action has its origin in emotion of some kind. Though we
choose to imagine that “pure reason” directs our conduct, in the last
resort we always do a thing because of the feeling that we have about
it. Not necessarily because we like doing it; but because instinctive
feeling of some sort—selfish or unselfish, personal, social,
conventional, sacrificial; the disturbing emotion called the sense of
duty, or the glorious emotion called the passion of love—is urging us to
it. Instinctive emotions, more or less sublimated; Love, Hatred,
Ambition, Fear, Anger, Hunger, Patriotism, Self-interest; these are the
true names of our reasons for doing things.

If this be true of our reactions to the physical world, it is none the
less true of our intercourse with the spiritual world. The will is moved
to seek that intercourse by emotion, by feeling; never by a merely
intellectual conviction. In the vigour and totality with which the
heroes of religion give themselves to spiritual interests, and in the
powers which they develop, we see the marks of instinctive feeling
operating upon the highest levels. By “a leash of longing,” says the
_Cloud of Unknowing_ again, man is led to be the servant of God; not by
the faultless deductions of dialectic, but by the mysterious logic of
the heart. He is moved most often, perhaps, by an innate unformulated
craving for perfection, or by the complementary loathing of
imperfection—a love of God, or a hatred of self—by the longing for
peace, the miserable sensations of disillusion, of sin, and of unrest,
the heart’s deep conviction that it needs a changeless object for its
love. Or, if by none of these, then by some other emotional stimulus.

A wide range of feeling states—some, it is true, merely self-seeking,
but others high and pure—influence the prayerful consciousness; but
those which are normal and healthy fall within two groups, one of
subjective, the other of objective emotion. The dominant motive of the
subjective group is the self’s feeling of its own imperfection,
helplessness, sinfulness, and need, over against the Perfect Reality
towards which its prayer is set; a feeling which grows with the growth
of the soul’s spiritual perceptions, and includes all the shaded
emotions of penitence and of humility. “For meekness in itself is naught
else but a true knowing and feeling of a man’s self as he is.” The
objective group of feelings is complementary to this, and is centred on
the goodness, beauty, and perfection of that Infinite Reality towards
which the soul is stretching itself. Its dominant notes are adoration
and love. Of these two fundamental emotions—humility and love—the first
lies at the back of all prayer of confession and petition, and is a
necessary check upon the arrogant tendencies of the will. The second is
the energizing cause of all adoration: adoration, the highest exercise
of the spirit of man. Prayer, then, on its emotional side should begin
in humble contrition and flower in loving adoration. Adoring love—not
mere emotional excitement, religious sentimentality or “spiritual
feelings”—but the strong, deep love, industrious, courageous and
self-giving which fuses all the powers of the self into one single state
of enormous intensity; this is the immortal element of prayer. Thought
has done all that it may when it has set the scene, prepared the ground,
adjusted the mind in the right direction. Will is wanted only whilst
there are oppositions to be transcended, difficult things to be done. It
represents the soul’s effort and struggle to be where it ought to be.
But there are levels of attainment in which the will does not seem to
exist any more as a separate thing. It is caught in the mighty rhythms
of the Divine will, merged in it and surrendered to it. Instead of its
small personal activity, it forms a part of the great deep action of the
Whole. In the higher degrees of prayer, in fact, will is transmuted into
love. We are reminded of the old story of the phœnix: the active busy
will seems to be burned up and utterly destroyed, but living love,
strong and immortal, springs from the ashes and the flame. When the
reasonable hope and the deliberate wilful faith in which man’s prayer
began are both fulfilled, this heavenly charity goes on to lose itself
upon the heights.

Within the normal experience of the ordinary Christian, love should give
two things to prayer; ardour and beauty. In his prayer, as it were, man
swings a censer before the altar of the Universe. He may put into the
thurible all his thoughts and dreams, all his will and energy. But
unless the fire of love is communicated to that incense, nothing will
happen; there will be no fragrance and no ascending smoke. These
qualities—ardour and beauty—represent two distinct types of feeling,
which ought both to find a place in the complete spiritual life,
balancing and completing one another. The first is in the highest degree
intimate and personal; the second is disinterested and æsthetic.

The intimate and personal aspect of spiritual love has found supreme
literary expression in the works of Richard of St. Victor, of St.
Bernard, of Thomas à Kempis, of our own Richard Rolle, Hilton, and
Julian of Norwich, and many others. We see it in our own day in its
purest form in the living mystic who wrote _The Golden Fountain_. Those
who discredit it as “mere religious emotionalism” do so because they
utterly mistake its nature; regarding it, apparently, as the spiritual
equivalent of the poorest and most foolish, rather than the noblest,
most heroic, and least self-seeking, types of human love. “I find the
lark the most wonderful of all birds,” says the author of _The Golden
Fountain_. “I cannot listen to his rhapsodies without being inspired (no
matter what I may be in the midst of doing or saying) to throw up my own
love to God. In the soaring insistence of his song and passion I find
the only thing in Nature which so suggests the high soaring and
rapturous flights of the soul. But I am glad that we surpass the lark in
sustaining a far more lengthy and wonderful flight; and that we sing,
not downwards to an earthly love, but upwards to a heavenly.” Like real
human love, this spiritual passion is poles asunder from every kind of
sentimentality. It is profoundly creative, it is self-giving, it does
not ask for anything in exchange. Although it is the source of the
highest kind of joy—though, as à Kempis says, the true lover “flies,
runs, and rejoices; is free, and cannot be restrained”—it has yet more
kinship with suffering than with merely agreeable emotions. This is the
feeling state, at once generous and desirous, which most of all enflames
the will and makes it active; this it is which gives ardour and reality
to man’s prayers. “For love is born of God, and cannot rest save in God,
above all created things.”

But there is another form of objective emotion besides this intimate and
personal passion of love, which ought to play an important part in the
life of prayer. I mean that exalted and essentially disinterested type
of feeling which expresses itself in pure adoration, and is closely
connected with the sense of the Beautiful. Surely this, since it
represents the fullest expression of one power in our nature—and that a
power which is persistently stretched out in the direction of the
Ideal—should have a part in our communion with the spiritual, as well as
with the natural world. The Beautiful, says Hegel, is the spiritual
making itself known sensuously. It represents, then, a direct message to
us from the heart of Reality; ministers to us of more abundant life.
Therefore the widening of our horizon which takes place when we turn in
prayer to a greater world than that which the senses reveal to us,
should bring with it a more poignant vision of loveliness, a more eager
passion for Beauty as well as for Goodness and Truth. When St. Augustine
strove to express the intensity of his regret for wasted years, it was
to his neglect of the Beauty of God that he went to show the poignancy
of his feeling, the immensity of his loss. “Oh Beauty so old and so new!
too late have I loved thee!”

It needs a special training, I think—a special and deliberate use of our
faculties—if we are to avoid this deprivation; and learn, as an integral
part of our communion with Reality, to lay hold of the loveliness of the
First and Only Fair. “I was caught up to Thee by Thy beauty, but dragged
back again by my own weight,” says Augustine in another place; and the
weight of the soul, he tells us, is its love—the pull of a misplaced
desire. All prayer which is primarily the expression of our wants rather
than our worship, which places the demand for daily bread before instead
of after the hallowing of the Ineffable Name, will have this
dragging-back effect.

Now, as the artist’s passion for sensuous beauty finds expression in his
work, and urges him to create beauty as well as he can, so too the
soul’s passion for spiritual beauty should find expression in its work;
that is to say, in its prayer. A work of art, says Hegel again, is as
much the work of the Spirit of God as is the beauty of Nature; but in
art the Holy Spirit works through human consciousness. Therefore man’s
prayer ought to be as beautiful as he can make it; for thus it
approaches more nearly to the mind of God. It should have dignity as
well as intimacy, form as well as colour. More, all those little magic
thoughts—those delicate winged fancies, which seem like birds rejoicing
in God’s sight—these, too, should have their place in it. We find many
specimens of them, as it were stuffed and preserved under glass shades,
in books of devotion. It is true that their charm and radiance cannot
survive this process; the colour now seems crude, the sheen of the
plumage is gone. But once these were the living, personal, spontaneous
expressions of the love and faith—the inborn poetry—of those from whom
they came. Many a liturgic prayer, which now seems to us impersonal and
official—foreign to us, perhaps, in its language and thought—will show
us, if we have but a little imaginative sympathy, the ardent mood, the
exquisite tact, the unforced dignity, of the mind which first composed
it; and form a standard by which we may measure our own efforts in this
kind.

But the beauty which we seek to incorporate into our spiritual
intercourse should not be the dead ceremonious beauty which comes of
mere dependence on tradition. It should be the freely upspringing lyric
beauty which is rooted in intense personal feeling; the living beauty of
a living thing. Nor need we fear the reproach that here we confuse
religion with poetry. Poetry ever goes like the royal banners before
ascending life; therefore man may safely follow its leadership in his
prayer, which is—or should be—life in its intensest form. Consider the
lilies: those perfect examples of a measured, harmonious, natural and
creative life, under a form of utmost loveliness. I cannot help thinking
that it is the duty of all Christians to impart something of that
flower-like beauty to their prayer; and only feeling of a special kind
will do it—that humble yet passionate love of the beautiful, which finds
the perfect object of its adoration in God and something of His fairness
in all created things. St. Francis had it strongly, and certain other of
the mystics had it too. In one of his rapturous meditations, Suso, for
whom faith and poetry were—as they should be—fused in one, calls the
Eternal Wisdom a “sweet and beautiful wild flower.” He recognized that
flowery charm which makes the Gospels fragrant, and is included in that
pattern which Christians are called to imitate if they can. Now, if this
quality is to be manifested in human life, it must first be sought and
actualized, consciously or unconsciously, in prayer; because it is in
the pure, sharp air of the spiritual order that it lives. It must spring
up from within outwards, must be the reflection of the soul’s communion
with “that Supreme Beauty which containeth in itself all goodness”;
which was revealed to Angela of Foligno, but which “she could in no wise
describe.” The intellect may, and should, conceive of this Absolute
Beauty as well as it can; the will may—and must—be set on the attaining
of it. But only by intuitive feeling can man hope to know it, and only
by love can he make it his own. The springs of the truest prayer and of
the deepest poetry—twin expressions of man’s outward-going passion for
that Eternity which is his home—rise very near together in the heart.




                       THE MYSTICISM OF PLOTINUS


In spite of his enormous importance for the history of Christian
philosophy, Plotinus is still one of the least known and least
understood among the great thinkers of the ancient world. The extreme
difficulty of his style, which Porphyry well described as “dense with
thought, and more lavish of ideas than words,” together with the natural
laziness of man, may perhaps account for this neglect. He was by choice
a thinker, contemplative, and teacher, not a writer. Therefore the
Enneads, which represent merely notes of lectures hastily and
unwillingly written down during the last fifteen years of his life,
offer few inducements to hurried readers. The fact that he was a
“mystic” has been held a further excuse for failure to understand the
more cryptic passages of his works; though as a matter of fact these are
the precipitations of a singularly clear and logical intellect, and will
yield all their secrets to a sympathetic and industrious attention. His
few translators have often been content to leave difficult phrases
unelucidated, or surrounded by a haze of suggestive words; and though
his splendid and poetic rhapsodies are quoted again and again, even
those later mystics who are most indebted to him show few signs of
first-hand study and comprehension of his system as a whole. Thanks to
this same obscurity, and the richness, intricacy, and suggestive quality
of his thought, most of his interpreters have tended to do for him that
which he did for his master Plato: they have re-handled him in the
interests of their own religion or philosophy. Of this, the Cambridge
Platonists are the most notorious example; but the same inclination is
seen in modern scholars. Thus Baron von Hügel seeks to introduce a
dualism between his mysticism and his metaphysics. Even the brilliant
exposition of his philosophy in the Dean of St. Paul’s _Gifford
Lectures_ is not wholly exempt from this criticism. A comparison of his
analysis with those of Baron von Hügel in _Eternal Life_, and of Mr.
Whittaker in _The Neoplatonists_ makes plain the part which temperament
has played in each of these works.

Plotinus himself would probably have been astonished by this charge of
obscurity. His teaching had by declaration two aims. The first was the
definitely religious aim of bringing men to a knowledge of Divine
reality; for he had the missionary ardour inseparable from the saintly
type. The second was the faithful interpretation of Platonic philosophy,
especially the doctrines of Plato, and of his own immediate master, the
unknown Alexandrian Ammonius: for his academic teaching consisted wholly
of a commentary on, and interpretation of, Plato’s works. His system,
therefore, is a synthesis of practical spirituality and formal
philosophy, and will only be grasped by those who keep this twofold
character in mind. There must always seem to be a conflict between any
closed and self-consistent metaphysical system and the freedom and
richness of the spiritual life: but since few metaphysicians are
mystics, and few mystics are able to take metaphysics more seriously
than the soldier takes the lectures of the armchair strategist, these
two readings of reality are seldom brought into direct opposition. In
Plotinus we have an almost unique example of the philosopher who is also
a practical mystic; and consequently of a mind that cannot be satisfied
with anything less than an intellectual system which finds room for the
most profound experiences of the spiritual life. In this peculiarity
some scholars have found his principal merit; others a source of
weakness. The position of his critics has been excellently stated by
Baron von Hügel in _Eternal Life_. He finds in the Enneads a “ceaseless
conflict” between “the formal principles of the philosopher” and “the
experiences of a profoundly religious soul.” The philosophy issues in an
utterly transcendent Godhead without qualities, activity, or being: the
mysticism issues in ecstatic union, actual contact, with a God, “the
atmosphere and home of souls” whose richness is the sum of all
affirmations. Yet, as a matter of fact, this disharmony is only
apparent; and is resolved when we understand the formal character of the
Plotinian dialectic as a “way,” a stepping-stone, the reduction to terms
of reason of some aspects of a reality beyond reason’s grasp. The
discrepancy is like that which exists between map and landscape.
Plotinus, constantly passing over from argument to vision, speaks
sometimes the language of geography, sometimes that of adventure: yet
both, within their spheres, are true. The Neoplatonic _via negativa_
always implies an unexpressed because ineffable affirmation. Therefore
its Absolute, of which reason can predicate no qualities, may yet be the
“flower of all beauty” as apprehended by the contemplative soul.

Since the doctrine of Ammonius is unknown to us, we have no means of
gauging the extent to which Plotinus depends on him: but probably we
shall not be far wrong if we attribute to his influence the peculiar
sense of reality, the deep spiritual inwardness, colour and life, with
which his great pupil invests the dogmas of Platonism. The main elements
of the Plotinian philosophy, however, are undoubtedly Platonic. The
Divine Triad, the precession of spirit and its return to its origin, the
unreal world of sense, the universal soul, the “real” or intelligible
world of the Ideas—these and other ingredients of his system are a part
of the common stock of Platonism. His originality and his attraction
consist in the use which he makes of them, the colour and atmosphere
with which they are endowed. That which is truly his own is the living
vision which creates from these formulæ a vivid world both actual and
poetic, answering with fresh revelations of reality the widening demands
and apprehensions of the human soul. This spiritual world is not merely
arrived at by a dialectic process. It is the world of his own intense
experience from which he speaks to us; using his texts, as Christian
mystics have often used the Bible, to support doctrines inspired by his
personal vision of truth. In spite of his passion for exactitude, the
sharpness and detail of his universe, he is thrown back, again and
again, on the methods of symbol and poetry. We must always be ready to
look past his formal words to the felt reality which he is struggling to
impart; a reality which is beyond the grasp of reason, and can only be
apprehended by the faculty which he calls spiritual intuition. To this
we owe the richness and suppleness of his system, the absence of
watertight compartments, the intimate relation with life. Whilst many
philosophers have spent their powers on proving the necessary existence
of an unglimpsed universe which shall satisfy the cravings of the mind,
Plotinus spent his in making a map, based on his own adventures in “that
country which is no mere vision, but a home;” and his apparently rigid
contours and gradients are attempts to tell at least the characteristics
of a living land.

Though the Enneads are a storehouse of profound and subtle thought, the
main principles on which their philosophy is based are simple, and can
be expressed briefly. All things, according to Plotinus, have come forth
from the Absolute Godhead or One, and only fulfil their destiny when
they return to their origin. The real life of the universe consists in
this flux and reflux: the outflow and self-expression of spirit in
matter, the “conversion” or return of spirit to the One. With the rest
of the Neoplatonists, he conceives of the Universe as an emanation,
eternally poured forth from this One, and diminishing in reality and
splendour the further it is removed from its source. The general
position is somewhat like that given by Dante in the opening of the
_Paradiso_:

                    “La gloria di colui che tutto move
                    Per l’universo penetra, e resplende
                    In una parte più, e meno altrove,”

though Plotinus would have rejected the spatial implications of the last
line, for to him the One was present everywhere. The Divine nature is a
trinity; but not, as in Christian theology, of co-equal persons. Its
three descending degrees, or hypostases, are the unconditioned One or
the Good—a term which implies perfection but carries no ethical
implications—the Divine Mind, Spirit, or _Nous_, and the Soul or Life of
the World. Nothing is real which does not participate in one or other of
these principles. Though the first two hypostases are roughly parallel
to the Eternal Father and Logos-Christ of Christian Platonism, and some
have found in the Plotinian _Psyche_ a likeness to the immanent Holy
Spirit, this superficial resemblance must not be pressed. Fatherhood
cannot be ascribed to the One save in so far as it is the first cause of
life, for it transcends all our notions of personality. Its real
parallel in Christian theology is that conception of the
“Super-essential Godhead, beyond and above the Trinity of Persons,”
which Eckhart and a few other daring mystics took through Dionysius the
Areopagite from the Neoplatonists. The One is, in fact, the Absolute as
apprehended by a religious soul. Nor is the Plotinian _Nous_ a person,
in any sense in which orthodox Christianity has understood that term,
though it is called by Plotinus our Father and Companion. Further, the
triadic series does not involve a succession either in time, or order of
generation; but only in value. The worlds of spirit and of soul are
co-eternal with the Absolute, the inevitable and unceasing expressions
of its creative activity. The utterly transcendent Perfect manifests as
Mind or Spirit (_Nous_); and this _is_ the world of being. Mind or
Spirit manifests as Life or Soul (_Psyche_); and this _is_ the reality
of the world of becoming. The lower orders are contained in the higher,
which are everywhere present, though each “remains in its own place.”
“Of all things the governance and existence are in these three.”

Whilst every image of the universe is deceptive, since its true nature
is beyond our apprehension, Plotinus invites us to picture the Triad, as
Dante did, by concentric circles through which radiate the energy and
splendour of the “flower of all beauty,” the Transcendent One. “The
first act is the act of the Good, at rest within itself, and the first
existence is the self-contained existence of the Good. But there is also
an act upon it, that of the _Nous_; which, as it were, lives about it.
And the Soul, outside, circles about the _Nous_, and by gazing upon it,
seeing into the depths of it, through it sees God” (I. 8. 2). Again,
“The One is not a Being, but the Source of being, which is its first
offspring. The One is perfect, that is, it has nothing, seeks nothing,
needs nothing; but as we may say it overflows, and this overflowing is
creative” (V. 1. 2). Yet this eternal creative action “beyond spirit,
sense, and life,” involves no self-loss. It is the welling forth of an
unquenchable spring, the eternal fountain of life.

As Christian Platonists described the Son as the self-expression of the
Father, so Plotinus describes his second Divine Principle as the eternal
irradiation of the Absolute—_il ciel che più della sua luce prende_.
This principle he calls _Nous_; a word carrying many shades of meaning,
which the older commentators generally rendered as Divine Mind, or
Intelligible Principle. Dean Inge has shown good reason for translating
it as “Spirit,” thus bringing the language of Plotinus into line with
the many later mystics who derive from him. As a matter of fact, _Nous_
contains both meanings. It is more spiritual than mind, more
intellectual than spirit, in the sense in which that word is commonly
employed. Those mediæval theologians who made a mystical identification
between the Hebrew conception of the Eternal Wisdom as we find it
described in Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus, and the Second Person of the
Trinity, came very near the Plotinian concept of _Nous_, which is at
once Intelligence and the intelligible sphere, Spirit and the spiritual
universe; the home of reality, and object of religious and poetic
intuition. It is, in one aspect, the “Father and Companion” of the soul
(V. 1. 3), in another “the Intellectual Universe, that sphere
constituted by a Principle wholly unlike what is known as intelligence
in us” (I. 8. 2). This is the “Yonder” to which he so often refers; the
“middle heaven” of Indian philosophy, Ruysbroeck’s “clear-shining world
between ourselves and God.”

                   “... e questo cielo non ha altro dove
                   Che la mente divina,”

says Dante; once more condensing the whole Neoplatonic vision in one
vivid phrase.

This rich and suggestive conception of the Second Principle, as at once
King and Creator of the world of life, and also itself the archetypal
world of true values, is the central fact of the Plotinian philosophy.
Its apprehension, he says, is beyond ordinary human reason, which is
fitted for correspondence with the world of life or soul. It is the
function of spiritual intuition; “a faculty which all possess, though
few use.” Such communion with the world of supernal reality is possible,
because man is potentially an inhabitant of it. “The Fatherland to us is
there, whence we have come: and there is the Father” (I. 6. 8). The
“apex” or celestial aspect of our soul is domiciled there. It “never
leaves the Divine Mind; but, while it clings yonder, allows the lower
soul, as it were, to hang down” (VI. 7. 5). Man is, in fact,
intermediary between the two Plotinian worlds of Spirit and Soul, and
participates in both. Eucken, in describing him as the meeting-place of
two orders of reality, is merely restating the doctrine of the
Neoplatonists.

As Spirit is the outbirth and manifestation of the One, so Soul, or
Life—the third member of the Triad—is the manifestation or matter of
Spirit; and forms the link between the physical and the supersensual
worlds. Spirit is “at once its Father and ever-present Companion” (V. 1.
3). Soul is a term covering the whole vital essence (_a_) of the world,
and (_b_) of the individual. It has two aspects. The celestial soul
aspires toward, and is in communion with, the spiritual order; the
natural soul hangs down and inspires the physical order, thereby
conferring on it a measure of reality. We are not, however, to
understand by Soul merely the aggregate of individuals. _Psyche_ is the
divine and eternal life of the created universe, comprehending its
infinite variety in a unity which embraces every object in the
sense-known scheme, and makes it “like one animal” (IV. 4. 32). It is:

              “A motion and a spirit, that impels
              All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
              And rolls through all things.”

The whole creation, says Plotinus, in one of his great poetic passages,
is “awake and alive at every point.” Each thing has its own peculiar
life in the all; though we, because our senses cannot discern the life
within wood and stone, deny that life. “Their living is in secret, but
they live” (IV. 4. 36). Here we are reminded of the Logos-Christ of the
“Sayings”—“Raise the stone and thou shalt find me: cleave the wood, and
there am I.” By this conception, which is elaborated from the doctrine
of the world-soul in the _Timæus_, Neoplatonism bridges the gap between
appearance and reality, and also solves the paradox of multitude in
unity. “We do not declare the Soul to be one in the sense of entirely
excluding multiplicity. This absolute oneness belongs only to the higher
nature. We make it both one and manifold; it has part in the nature
which is divided among bodies, but it has part also in the indivisible,
and so again we find it to be one” (IV. 9. 2).

Soul, which has in its highest manifestations many of the characters of
Spirit, is the eternal upholder of the world of change. “Things have a
beginning, and perish when the soul that leads the chorus-dance of life
departs; but the soul itself is eternal and cannot suffer change ...
what the soul is, and what its power, will be more manifestly, more
splendidly evident, if we think how its counsel comprehends and conducts
the heavens; how it communicates itself to all this vast bulk and
ensouls it through all its extension, so that every fragment lives by
the soul entire, which is present everywhere like the Father which begat
it” (V. 1. 2). Soul, then, which is in one sense the reality of the
world of becoming and immanent therein, is also a denizen of eternity,
in virtue of its continuity with and direct dependence on _Nous_. An
unbroken series of ascending values unites the world of living effort
with the One. It is this which makes the system of Plotinus a philosophy
of infinite adventure and infinite hope.

Soul is the lowest of the Divine hypostases. Below it in the scale of
values is the material universe to which its lower activities give form,
slumbering in the rocks and dreaming in the plants. In plants, says
Plotinus, “the more rebellious and self-willed phase of soul is
expressed”: a doctrine which will find an echo in many a gardener’s
heart. The sensible beauty of the world is the signature of soul, and
points to something “Yonder”; for through loveliness it participates in
the world of spiritual values, and we in apprehending beauty turn away
from matter to _Nous_ (I. 8. 4). Matter, as such, has no reality except
as the stuff from which soul weaves up its outward vesture. Deprived of
soul, it is in itself, he says, “not-being” and “no-thing”: “its very
nature is one long want” (I. 8. 5). As a picture is the crude and
partial condensation of an artist’s dream—all that he can force his
recalcitrant material to express—so the physical world is but a
fragmentary manifestation of the great and vivid universe of soul, and
the body is the smallest part of the real man. When we grasp this, we
see how great is the sum of possibilities opened to us by the Cosmos;
how easily the country “Yonder” can find room for all the visions and
intuitions of artists, poets, and saints.

The Plotinian doctrine of man, which became in due course the classical
doctrine of Christian mysticism, is the logical outcome of this
cosmology. Man, like the rest of Creation, has come forth from God and
will only find happiness and full life when his true being is re-united,
first with the Divine Mind, and ultimately with the One. “When the
phantasm has returned to the Original, the journey is achieved” (VI. 9.
11). Hence “our quest is of an End, and not of Ends. That only can be
chosen which is ultimate and noblest, that which calls to the tenderest
longings of the soul” (I. 4. 6). As the descending stages of reality are
three, so the stages of the ascent are three. They are called in the
Enneads purification, the work of reason, which marks the transference
of interest from sense to soul; enlightenment—the work of spiritual
intuition—which lifts life into communion with the eternal world of
spirit; and ecstasy, that profound transfiguration of consciousness
whereby the “spirit in love” achieves union with the One. These stages
are familiar to all students of Christian asceticism, as the codified
“mystic way” of purgation, illumination, and union: a formula which
Dionysius the Areopagite took from the Neoplatonists. But it is
important to remember that in Plotinus this “way” is not—as it sometimes
becomes in mediæval writers—a rigid series of mutually exclusive
psychological states, separated by water-tight bulkheads. It is rather a
diagram by which he seeks to describe one undivided movement of life; a
prolonged effort and adventure, which has for its object a deeper and
deeper penetration into Reality, the achievement of a true scale of
values, in order that the real proportions of existence may be grasped.
In this movement nothing is left behind; but everything is carried up
into a higher synthesis, as the latent possibilities of humanity are
gradually realized, and man grows up into eternal life.

“Since your soul is so exalted a power, so divine, be confident that in
virtue of its possession you are close to God. Begin therefore with the
help of this principle to make your way to Him. You have not far to go:
there is not much between. Lay hold of that which is more divine than
this god-like thing; lay hold of that apex of the soul which borders on
the Supreme (_Nous_), from which the soul immediately derives” (V. 1.
3).

All practical mysticism is at bottom a process of transcendence,
“passing on the upward way all that is other than God” (I. 6. 7): and
this process, in different temperaments, assumes different forms. Since
Plotinus united in his own person the characteristics of the
metaphysician, the poet and the saint, he tends to present it under
three aspects; as the logical outcome of a reasoned philosophy, as a
moral purification which strips us of all unreality, and as a
progressive initiation into beauty. “Beholding this Being, the Conductor
of all existence, the self-intent that ever gives and never takes,
resting rapt in the vision and possession of so lofty a loveliness, what
beauty can the soul then lack? For this, the beauty supreme, the
absolute and the primal, fashions its lovers to beauty and makes them
also worthy of love. And for this the sternest and uttermost combat is
set before these souls; all our labour is for this, lest we be left
without part in this noblest vision, which to attain is to be blessed in
the blissful sight, which to fail of is to fail utterly” (I. 6. 7). In
the high place which he gives to the category of beauty, which is to him
one of the three final attributes of God, the strongly poetic character
of his vision of Reality becomes evident. He anticipates Hegel in
regarding natural beauty as the sensuous manifestation of spirit and
signature of the world-soul “fragment as it were of the Primal Beauty,
making beautiful to the fullness of their capacity whatsoever it grasps
and moulds” (I. 6. 6): and those lovers, artists, and musicians who can
apprehend it have already made the first step towards the inner vision
of the One. Therefore the harsh other-worldliness which made some
mediæval ascetics turn from visible loveliness as a snare, would have
seemed blasphemy to Plotinus, who would certainly have argued with St.
Augustine that “there is no health in those who find fault with any part
of Thy creation” (_Conf._ vii. 14). On the contrary, his doctrine gives
a religious sanction and a philosophic explanation to those special
experiences and apprehensions of artists, poets, and so-called
“nature-mystics”—known to many normal persons in moments of
exaltation—when

             “The world is so charged with the grandeur of God
             It must shine out, like shining from shook foil.”

In such hours, he would say, we perceive through matter the inhabiting
_Psyche_, and by it reach out to communion with _Nous_, for “this is how
the material becomes beautiful; by participating in the thought which
flows from the Divine” (I. 6. 2). He would have understood Blake’s claim
to see the universe as “a world of imagination and vision,” and accepted
Erigena’s great saying, “every visible and invisible creature is a
theophany or appearance of God.”

Thus the whole mystic ascent can be conceived as a movement through
visible beauty to its invisible source, and thence to “the inaccessible
Beauty, dwelling as if in consecrated precincts apart from the common
ways” (I. 6. 8). Yet this progress is not so much a change in our
consciousness of the world and of ourselves, as a shifting of the centre
of our being from sense to soul, from soul to spirit, whereby we come
actually to live at new levels of existence. “For all there are two
stages of the path, according to whether they are ascending or have
already gained the upper sphere. The first stage is conversion from the
lower life: the second—taken by those who have already reached the
Spiritual sphere, as it were set a footprint there, but must still
advance within that realm—lasts till they reach its extreme summit, the
term attained When the topmost peak of the Spiritual realm is won” (I.
3. 1).

The process is both intellectual and moral, since its goal is the
absolute Truth and Beauty no less than the absolute Good. “Each must
become God-like and beautiful who cares to see God and Beauty” (I. 6.
9). It involves deliberate effort and drastic purification of mind and
heart, “cutting away all that is excessive, straightening all that is
crooked, bringing light to all that is in shadow, labouring to make all
one glow of beauty” (I. 6. 9). As “all knowing comes by likeness” (I. 8.
1), we must ourselves have moral beauty if we would see the “Beauty
There.” But whether this way be conceived under æsthetic or ascetic
symbols, Plotinus is at one with all the mystics in declaring that the
driving force which urges the soul along the pathway to reality is love.
This inspires its labour, supports its stern purifications, “detaches it
from the body and lifts it to the Intelligible World” (III. 6. 5), and
gives it at last “the only eye that sees the mighty Beauty” (I. 6. 9).
Love means for him active desire; “the longing for conjunction and
rest.” All shades of spiritual and poetic passion, the graded meanings
of admiration, enthusiasm, and worship, are included in it. It is “the
true magic of the universe”; an attribute of _Nous_, and an earnest of
real life. “The fullest life is the fullest love, and the love comes
from the celestial light which streams forth from the Absolute One” (VI.
7. 23). It is true that the impersonal nature of the Neo-platonic One
gives no apparent scope to the intimate feeling which plays so large a
part in Christian devotion. But the reality and warmth of the true
mystical passion for the Absolute—its complete independence of
anthropomorphic conceptions—is strikingly demonstrated by those glowing
passages in which Plotinus allows his overpowering emotion, “that
veritable love, that sharp desire,” to speak; and appeals to the
experience of those fellow-mystics who have attained the vision of “the
splendour yonder, and felt the burning of the flame of love for that
which is there to know; the passion of the lover resting on the bosom of
his love” (VI. 9. 4). This passion is the instrument of that ecstasy in
which he taught that those men who have “wrought themselves into harmony
with the Supreme” may briefly experience the vision of the ineffable
One. In it the spirit is burned to a white heat, which fuses in one
single state the highest activities of feeling, thought, and will.
Though the doctrine of ecstasy appears in Philo, and could reasonably be
deduced from Plato himself, its treatment by Plotinus, the intense
actuality and poetic fervour of its presentation, are the obvious
results of such personal experiences as Porphyry describes to us. This
ecstasy, according to him—and here he is supported by the majority of
later mystics—is not a merely passive state, nor does it result in a
barren satisfaction. When, withdrawing from all lesser interests, the
soul passes beyond all contingency “through virtue to the Divine Mind,
through wisdom to the Supreme,” and poises itself upon God in a simple
state of rapt attention, it receives as a reward of its effort not only
the beatific vision of the Perfect, but also an accession of vitality.
At this moment, says Plotinus, it “has another life” and “knows that the
Supplier of true life is present.” The mystic, or “sage,” is not a
spiritual freak; but the man who has grown up to the full stature of
humanity and united himself with that Source of life which is “present
everywhere, yet absent except only to those prepared to receive it” (VI.
9. 4). Therefore he alone can be trusted to be fully active; since his
action is not a mere restless striving after the discordant objects of a
scattered attention, but an ordered movement based on the contemplation
of Reality.

“We always move round the One. If we did not, we should be dissolved and
no longer exist. But we do not always look at the One. When we do, we
attain the end of our existence, and our rest; and no longer sing out of
tune, but form a divine chorus round the One” (VI. 9. 7).

Yet in spite of the majesty and purity of his vision, the devil’s
advocate is not without material for an attack upon Plotinus. The charge
brought by St. Augustine against “the books of the Platonists” as a
whole—and by these he meant chiefly the Enneads—is well known. He found
in their philosophy no response to the needs of the struggling and the
imperfect. In its complete escape from the standing religious snare of
anthropomorphism, Neoplatonism also escaped from the grasp of humanity.
It left man everything to do for himself. For the Christian philosophy
of divine incarnation, dramatized in history, and expressed in the
phrase “God so loved the world,” the Neoplatonist substitutes “So the
world loves God.” “No one there,” says Augustine of their school,
“hearkens to Him who calleth, Come unto Me all ye that labour.” The One
is the transcendent Source and the Magnet of the Universe, the object
and satisfaction of spiritual passion; but not the lover, helper, or
saviour of the soul. It “needs nothing, desires nothing.” The quality of
mercy cannot be ascribed to it. As a term, it is as attractive and
impersonal as a mountain peak; and the mystic attaining it has something
of the aristocratic self-satisfaction of the successful mountaineer. The
Christian and Sūfi mystics, even when most deeply influenced by
Neoplatonism, have always felt the incompleteness of this conception.
They see the soul’s achievement of reality as the result of two
movements, one human and one divine: a “mutual attraction.” “God needs
me as much as I need Him,” said Meister Eckhart. “Our natural will,”
said Julian of Norwich, “is to have God, and the good-will of God is to
have us.”

“I was given,” says Angela of Foligno, “a deep insight into the humility
of God, towards man and all other things.” “The love of God,” says
Ruysbroeck, “is an outpouring and an indrawing tide.” These statements
undoubtedly represent a normal element in spiritual experience; that
sense of a response, a self-giving on the part of its transcendent
object which—whatever explanation we may choose to give of it—is
integral to a developed mysticism. Neoplatonism, considered as a
religious philosophy, is impoverished by its failure to recognize and
find a place for this.

Moreover, the so-called social side of religion, so grossly exaggerated
by the amateur theologians of the present day, certainly receives less
than justice from Plotinus; for whom the “political virtues” are merely
preparatory to the spiritual life, and that spiritual life an exclusive
system of self-culture, having as its final stage a “flight of the alone
to the Alone.” Moral goodness is a form of beauty, and therefore “real”;
but there is no suggestion that goodness as such is dearer to the
Absolute than beauty or truth. The problem of evil is looked at, but
left unsolved: a weakness which Plotinus shares with most mystical
philosophers. Evil, he says, has no place in the “untroubled blissful
life” of the three Divine Principles. Therefore it is not real, but “a
form of non-being” (I. 8. 3): a doctrine which makes an unexpected
reappearance eleven hundred years later in the Revelations of Julian of
Norwich. Since the aim of the “wise man” is the transcendence of the
sense world, there is, moreover, no adequate recognition of those sins,
wrongs, and sufferings with which that “half-real” world is charged.
Though effort and self-denial have their part in the Plotinian scheme,
that transfiguration of pain which was the greatest achievement of the
Gospel is beyond the scope of his philosophy. Its remedy for failure and
grief is not humble consecration, but lofty withdrawal to that spiritual
sphere where the divine element of the soul is at home, untroubled by
the conflicts, evils, and chances of life. Even the selfless sorrow of a
father or a patriot is to be transcended. Though in this his practice
was doubtless better than his doctrine—for we know that he was a good
citizen, a beloved teacher, and a loyal friend—he speaks in a tone of
icy contempt of those who allow themselves to be disturbed by the
world’s woe.

“If the man that has attained felicity meets some turn of fortune that
he would not have chosen, there is not the slightest lessening of his
happiness for that. If there were, his felicity would be veering or
falling from day to day; _the death of a child would bring him down_, or
the loss of some trivial possession.... How can he take any great
account of the vacillations of power, or the ruin of his fatherland?
Verily, if he thought any such event a great disaster, or any disaster
at all, he must be of a strange way of thinking” (I. 4. 7).

Such a sentence, however we look at it, goes far to justify the
description of the Neoplatonic saint as “a self-sufficient sage”; and
explains the question with which Augustine turned from the Enneads—“When
would those books have taught me charity?”

In spite, however, of this fundamental difference in tone, the wider our
reading the more clearly we must realize the extent to which the
Christian mystics are conscious or unconscious disciples of Plotinus.
That unity of witness which is one of the most impressive facts in the
history of mysticism, may reasonably be regarded as evidence of the
reality of that world of spiritual values which contemplatives
persistently describe. But on its literary side, this same unity of
witness depends closely upon the fact that these contemplatives, however
widely separated by time and formal creed, were able to make plain their
adventures to other men by means of conceptions drawn from the Plotinian
scheme; which has proved itself able to rationalize and find room for
the deepest spiritual intuitions of man. It could do this because a
great mystic made it. Hence we find it implied, even where unexpressed,
in many of the masterpieces of later mysticism—both Christian and
Mahomedan—and some knowledge of it is a necessary clue to the full
understanding of these writings. The Sūfi ’Attar, describing the soul’s
arrival in “the Valley of Unity where it contemplates the naked
Godhead,” is equally its debtor with the Protestant mystic William Law,
declaring that “everything in temporal nature is descended out of that
which is eternal, and stands as a palpable visible outbirth of it; so
that when we know how to separate the grossness, death, and darkness of
time from it, we find what it is in its eternal state.” Yet few of the
theologians and contemplatives who owe most to Plotinus had any
first-hand acquaintance with the Enneads. Their influence reached the
mediæval world by two main channels. The first line of descent is
through the works of Victorinus and St. Augustine; the second through
the philosopher Proclus and his mysterious disciple Dionysius the
Areopagite. These lines meet in the _Divina Commedia_, which may be
regarded in one aspect as the supreme poetic flower of Neoplatonism.

The dramatic life-history and exuberant self-revelations of St.
Augustine have obscured the debt which Christian philosophy owes to that
less assertive convert and theologian, Victorinus. Yet since Augustinian
Neoplatonism is derived from his writings and translations, he is the
real link between Plotinus and the mystics of the Latin Church. A
celebrated man of letters and a professor of rhetoric, he had been
formed by Neoplatonic philosophy; and is said to have been the author of
that Latin translation of the Enneads, which was chief among those
“books of the Platonists” that provided St. Augustine’s stepping-stones
to faith. The stir, not to say scandal, caused by his conversion—so
vividly described in the “Confessions”—was justified: for the event was
crucial in the history of western Christianity. After his conversion,
which took the form of a re-interpretation, not an abandonment, of his
old beliefs, he set himself to the creation of a Neoplatonic theology;
in which the Plotinian triad, and doctrine of the soul’s precession and
return to the One, appear almost undisguised. The One he tries to
identify with the transcendent and immutable Father. “Son” and “Spirit”
are to him two aspects of _Nous_; the fount of all substantial
existence, and containing from eternity all things in their archetypal
reality. The Son or Logos is “the Logos of all that is,” ever gushing
forth from the “living fountain” of the Father. It was from Victorinus
that Catholicism obtained the characteristic Plotinian notions of Deity
as “ever active and ever at rest,” and of the life of reality as
consisting in immanence, progress, and return, which meet us again and
again in the writings of the mystics.

It is plain that St. Augustine, in his first Christian period, was
deeply indebted to Plotinus, whom he knew through Victorinus and
frequently quotes by name; calling him “one of those more excellent
philosophers” whose doctrine of the soul is in harmony with the Prologue
of the Fourth Gospel. When he came to write the “Confessions,” the
glamour of the Platonic vision had begun to fade, and he was able to
deal in a critical spirit with his own brief Plotinian experience of
“that which Is” (VII. 17). Nevertheless, none can understand that book
without some knowledge of the Enneads, from which all its finest
passages are derived, and in more than one instance—especially Book VII
and the celebrated tenth chapter of Book IX—closely imitated. In
Augustine’s invocation of “the Beauty so old and so new,” in his
description of the “Country which is no vision but a Father-land,” or of
“the Light which never changes, above the soul, above the intelligence,”
we see how closely he had studied them, the extent to which their
language had permeated his thought. It is, however, in the tracts
composed soon after his conversion—e.g. _De Quantitate Animæ_, written
about A.D. 388—that their influence is most strongly marked; and the
ecstatic vision of the One is definitely put forward as the summit of
Christian experience. From this time onwards, the main outlines of
mystical theology were more or less fixed: and since St. Augustine was
one of the most widely read and deeply reverenced of the Fathers, with
an authority hardly inferior to that of Scripture itself, its
Neoplatonic colour was never lost. Wherever Christian mysticism passes
from the emotional and empirical to the philosophic, this colour is
clearly seen, and the concepts of Plotinus, more or less disguised,
reappear: even in those mediæval writers who had no direct acquaintance
with Greek philosophy. The immense popularity of the so-called Dionysian
writings, which derive much of their doctrine through Proclus from the
Enneads, helped to establish yet more firmly the Neoplatonic character
of Christian and also of Sūfi mysticism. Through these writings the
conceptions of the Super-essential Godhead; of successive spiritual
spheres or emanations of descending splendour, intervening between the
Absolute and the physical world; and of ecstatic union with the
transcendent and unconditioned One as the term of religious experience,
passed over from the ancient to the mediæval world. Translated from
Greek into Syriac in the fifth century, they deeply affected Sūfi
philosophy. They entered Western thought in the ninth century, through
Erigena’s Latin translation. It is said that by A.D. 850 Dionysius was
known from the Tigris to the Atlantic: and from this time onwards his
influence, and through him that of Plotinus, can be traced in the
spiritual literature of Christianity and Islam.

Erigena, whose original works are strongly coloured by Neoplatonism, is
the first mediæval writer in whom this influence appears. He follows
Plotinus and Dionysius closely in teaching that the Absolute Godhead is
“beyond being” and therefore transcendent to the trinity of Persons; a
doctrine of doubtful orthodoxy, which was of great importance in the
later development of mysticism. But a still closer approximation to the
thought, and especially to the psychology of Plotinus, is found in
Richard of St. Victor: perhaps the greatest mystical theologian,
certainly one of the most influential writers, of the early Middle Ages.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries his works, which are now
hardly read, circulated through western Europe, and shaped the
developing mysticism of England, Germany, and Flanders. Dante, who calls
him one “who in contemplation was more than man,” places his radiant
soul among those of the great teachers in the Heaven of the Sun (_Par._
X. 131). Abandoning alike the many worlds of Dionysius and the crude
dualism of popular religion, Richard taught that three spheres are open
to human contemplation: _sensibilia_, _intelligibilia_, and
_intellectibilia_—a series closely analogous to the three worlds of
Plotinus. He said that three kinds of contemplation on man’s part
corresponded with these worlds. These are _mentis dilatatio_, a widening
of the soul’s vision, which yet remains within the natural order:
_mentis sublevatio_, an uplifting of the illuminated mind to the
apprehension of “things above itself” (or, as Neoplatonists would say,
intelligibles); and finally _mentis alienatio_ or ecstasy, in which the
soul gazes on Truth in its naked simplicity. Then “elevated above itself
and rapt in ecstasy, it beholds things in the Divine Light at which all
human reason succumbs.” This divine light is the _lumen gloriæ_, the
radiance of the spiritual or intelligible world, which transforms the
soul and makes it capable of beholding God; a conception which became a
commonplace of mediæval theology, was adopted by nearly all the mystics,
and plays an important part in the _Paradiso_.

            “Lume è lassù, che visibile face
              lo Creatore a quella creatura
              che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace” (xxx. 100).

Ruysbroeck—a student of Dionysius and of Richard—says of it in _The
Twelve Béguines_: “From the Face of the Father there shines a clear
light on those souls whose thought is bare and stripped of images,
uplifted above the senses and above similitudes, beyond and without
reason, in high purity of spirit. This Light is not God, but it is the
mediator between the seeing thought and God.” These passages and many
like them can be shown to derive directly through St. Augustine from the
Enneads. Thus Plotinus says: “Light is visible by Light. The _Nous_ sees
itself, and this light, shining on the soul, enlightens it and makes it
a member of the spiritual world” (V. 3. 8). Augustine, apparently
referring to this passage among others, says: “Often and in many places
does Plotinus declare, expounding the meaning of Plato, that what they
believe to be the Soul of the World has its bliss from the same source
as ours, namely, a Light which it is not, but by which it was created,
and from whose spiritual illumination it shines spiritually” (_De Civ.
Dei._ X. 2). And, of his own ecstatic experience, “I entered and beheld
with the mysterious eye of my soul the Light that never changes, above
the eye of my soul, above my intelligence.... He who knows the truth
knows that Light, and he who knows that Light knows Eternity” (_Conf._
VII. 10).

From the thirteenth century onwards, the majority of the mediæval
mystics show knowledge and appreciation of those Plotinian ideas which
reached them—though in an attenuated form—through St. Augustine,
Dionysius, and Richard of St. Victor. Even the Franciscan and
Christo-centric enthusiasm of such contemplatives as Jacopone da Todi
and Angela of Foligno was affected by these lofty conceptions. Thus
Jacopone takes from the Neoplatonists the three stages of spiritual
experience, and describes in unequivocal language his successive
achievements of that Logos-Christ—so near the Plotinian _Nous_—“_che de
omne bellezze se’ fattore_,” and of the “Imageless Good” who cannot be
named. So too, Angela’s successive visions of the divine fullness and
beauty, and of “the ineffable Thing of which nought may be said” depend
for their expression on the same philosophy.

Nor was its penetrative influence confined to the mystical schools. St.
Thomas Aquinas, who accepts and expounds in the _Summa_ (I. _q._12.
_a._5) the doctrine of the _lumen gloriæ_, is considerably indebted to
Plotinus in several other particulars; though he cites him inaccurately,
and does not seem to have known him at first hand. In a remarkable
passage, which afterwards influenced one of the finest rhapsodies of
Ruysbroeck, he has actually “lifted” the most celebrated phrase in the
Sixth Ennead, and adapted it to the distinctively Christian and
non-Platonic view of divine union, as a “mutual act” of God and the
soul. “In a wonderful and unspeakable manner,” says St. Thomas of the
soul in this place, “she both seizes and is seized upon, devours and is
herself devoured, embraces and is violently embraced; and by the knot of
love she unites herself with God, and _is with Him as the Alone with the
Alone_.”

It is in a later and less orthodox son of St. Dominic, the formidable
and adventurous thinker Eckhart, that the influence of Plotinus on the
mediæval mind is best seen: passing through him to Suso, Tauler,
Ruysbroeck, and other mystics of the fourteenth century. Eckhart’s
philosophy still provides one of the most suggestive glosses upon the
Enneads. He made that distinction between the absolute and
supra-personal Godhead and the God of devotion, which was almost
inevitable for a Christian thinker trying to find a place in theology
for the Neoplatonic One. The Godhead, he says, is “a non-God, a
non-Spirit, a non-person, a non-image: a sheer pure One.” The Son, in
whom “the Father becomes conscious of Himself,” combines the attributes
of the Logos-Christ with those of the _Nous_. In Him are the archetypes
of all created things. There is thus an emanation from the Godhead,
through the Son, into creation. The soul’s destiny is exactly that
conceived by Plotinus: it must ascend to the spiritual world, and
through it to its origin, the One, “flowing back into the bottom of the
bottomless fountain from which it flowed forth.” In Tauler and Suso, and
especially in the great Flemish contemplative Ruysbroeck, these
ideas—though modified by their inferior speculative ability and more
ardent spirit of Christian devotion—are still strongly felt: and since
their works and those of their disciples nourished many succeeding
generations of contemplatives, through them the mystical side of the
Neoplatonic tradition was handed down. In Ruysbroeck, with his threefold
division of spiritual experience into “the moral life, the contemplative
life, and the super-essential life,” and his astonishing and detailed
descriptions of the soul’s achievement of the Essential Unity, the
“death into the One through love,” the vision of Plotinus is fully
baptized into the Catholic Church. In Jacob Boehme, who drew through
Schwenkenfeld and Weigel from Eckhart and his school, the doctrine of
the three worlds which forms the basis of his cosmology contains
distinct reminiscences of the Plotinian Triad. “These three,” he says,
“are nought else than the One God in His wonderful works ... and we are
thus to understand a threefold Being, or three worlds in one another.”
His conception of the Light-world, source of all spiritual beauty and
home of “the true human essence,” is very near to the _Nous_. Yet the
very closeness with which all these mystics follow those parts of the
Neoplatonic doctrine which appeal to them, makes it possible for us to
measure the distance which separates their minds, their tone and temper,
from that of Plotinus and his school. The calm, the austerity of
thought, the emphasis on beauty, the clear cool light of the
Intelligible World have departed. These men see philosophy through the
haze of Christian feeling. Their work is full of passionate effort; is
centred on the ideas of sacrifice and of pain. Their religion is
coloured by the sharp Christian consciousness of sin, and by the
difficulty—never squarely faced—of reconciling devotion to a personal
redeemer with the mystical passion for the Absolute. That the philosophy
of the Enneads was able to enter a world so remote from its spirit, and
come to terms with an attitude of mind in many respects opposed to that
of its creator, is an oblique proof of the authenticity of its claim to
interpret the spiritual experiences of man.

                         THREE MEDIÆVAL MYSTICS


                                   I
                      “THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS”


                                   I


_The Mirror of Simple Souls_—a rare work on the spiritual life, of which
manuscripts exist in the British Museum, the Bodleian, and one or two
other public libraries—has so far received little or no attention from
students of religious literature. Yet it may turn out to possess great
importance, as one of the missing links in the history of English
mysticism: for it is a middle-English translation, made at the close of
the fourteenth century or beginning of the fifteenth, of the lost work
of a French thirteenth-century mystic. It shows, therefore, that the
common View of French mediæval religion as unmystical needs
qualification; and further indicates a path by which the contemplative
tradition of western Europe reached England and affected the development
of our native mystical school.

_The Mirror of Simple Souls_, as we now have it, is a work of nearly
60,000 words in length. So far from being simple, it deals almost
exclusively with the rarest and most sublime aspects of spiritual
experience. Its theme is the theme of all mysticism: the soul’s
adventures on its way towards union with God. It is not, like the
_Melum_ of Richard Rolle, or _Revelations_ of Julian of Norwich, a
subjective book; the record of personal experiences and actual
“conversations in heaven.” Rather it is objective and didactic, a work
of geography, not a history of travel; an advanced text-book of the
contemplative life. Only from the ardour and exactitude of its
descriptions, its strange air of authority, its defiance of pious
convention, can we gather that it is the fruit of first-hand experience,
not merely of theological study: though its writer was clearly a trained
theologian, familiar with the works of St. Augustine and Dionysius the
Areopagite, whom no mystic of the Middle Ages wholly escaped, and
apparently with those of St. Bernard, Hugh and Richard of St. Victor,
and other mediæval authorities on the inner life.

I have said that the _Mirror_, as we have it, purports to be the
translation of an unknown French treatise. This translation, so far as
we can judge from its language, was probably made in the early years of
the fifteenth century, perhaps at the end of the fourteenth. Its author,
then, lived at the close of the golden age of English mysticism: he was
the contemporary of Julian of Norwich, who was still living in 1413, and
of Walter Hilton, who died in 1395. Himself a mystic, he was no servile
translator; rather the eager interpreter of the book which he wished to
make accessible to his countrymen. Our manuscripts begin with his
prologue: an ingenuous confession of the difficulties of the
undertaking, his own temerity in daring to touch these “high divine
matters,” his fear lest the book should fall into unsuitable hands and
its more extreme teachings be misunderstood. It appears from this
prologue that our version of the _Mirror_ is a second, or revised
edition; the first having failed to be comprehensible to its readers.

The character of the translator, as disclosed for us in his prologue, is
itself interesting. Clearly he was a contemplative; and the “high
ghostly feelings” of which he treats are to him the strictly practical
objects of supreme desire, though he modestly disclaims their
possession. He appears before us as a gentle, humble, rather timid soul:
often frankly terrified by the daring flights of his “French book,”
which he is at pains to explain in a safe sense. One would judge him,
from the peeps which he gives us into his mind, a disciple of the devout
and homely school of Walter Hilton, rather than a descendant of the
group of advanced mystics which produced in the mid-fourteenth century
_The Cloud of Unknowing_, _The Pistle of Private Counsel_, and other
profound studies of the inner life. These books were written under the
strong influence of Dionysius the Areopagite; whose _Mystical Theology_,
under the title of _Dionise Hid Divinite_, was first translated into
English by some member of the school. But to the translator of the
_Mirror_ his author’s drastic applications of the Dionysian paradoxes of
indifference, passivity, and nescience as the path to knowledge teem
with “hard sayings.” His attitude towards them is that of reverential
alarm: he fears their probable effect on the mind of the hasty reader.
They seem, as he says in one place, “fable or error or hard to
understand” until one has read them several times. He is sure that their
real meaning is unexceptionable; but terribly afraid that they will be
misunderstood.

Here, then, is the prologue which sets forth his point of view.

“To the worship and laud of the Trinity be this work begun and ended!
Amen.

“This book, the which is called _The Mirror of Simple Souls_, I, most
unworthy creature and outcast of all other, many years gone wrote it out
of French into English after my lewd cunning; in hope that by the grace
of God it should profit the devout souls that shall read it. This was
forsooth mine intent. But now I am stirred to labour it again new, for
because I am informed that some words thereof have been mistaken.
Therefore, if God will, I shall declare these words more openly. For
though Love declare the points in the same book, it is but shortly
spoken, and may be taken otherwise than it is meant of them that read it
suddenly and take no further heed. Therefore such words to be twice
opened it would be more of audience [understanding]: and so by grace of
our Lord good God it shall the more profit to the auditors. But both the
first time and now, I have great dread to do it. For the book is of high
divine matters and high ghostly feelings, and cunningly and full
mystically it is spoken, and I am a creature right wretched and unable
to do any such work: poor and naked of ghostly fruits, darkened with
sins and defaults, environed and wrapped therein oft times, the which
taketh away my taste and my clear sight; so that little I have of
ghostly understanding and less of the feeling of divine love. Therefore
I may say the words of the prophet: ‘My teeth be nought white to bite of
this bread.’ But Almighty Jesu, God that feedeth the worm and gives
sight to the blind and wit to the unwitty; give me grace of wit and
wisdom in all times wisely to govern myself, following alway His will,
and send me clear sight and true understanding well to do this work to
His worship and pleasaunce: profit also and increase of grace to ghostly
lovers that be disposed and called to this high election of the freedom
of soul.”

He goes on to the difficulty which dogs all writers on mysticism; the
impossibility of making mystic truth seem real to those who have no
experience of the mystic life. It has been said that only mystics can
write about mysticism. It were truer to say that only mystics can read
about it.

“Oh ye that shall read this book! do ye as David says in the Psalter,
_Gustate et videte_: that is to say, ‘Taste and see.’ But why trow ye he
said, taste first, e’er than he said see? For first a soul must taste,
e’er it have very understanding and true sight; sight of ghostly
workings of divine love. Oh full naked and dark, dry and unsavoury be
the speakings and writings of these high ghostly feelings of the love of
God to them that have not tasted the sweetness thereof. But when a soul
is touched with grace, by which she has tasted somewhat of the sweetness
of this divine fruition, and begins to wade, and draweth the draughts to
her-ward, then it savours the soul so sweetly that she desires greatly
to have of it more and more, and pursueth thereafter. And then the soul
is glad and joyful to hear and to read of all thing that pertains to
this high feeling of the workings of divine love, in nourishing and
increasing her love and devotion to the will and pleasing of Him that
she loves, God Christ Jesu. Thus she enters and walks in the way of
illumination, that she might be taught into the ghostly influences of
the divine work of God, there to be drowned in the high flood, and oned
to God by ravishing of love, by which she is all one spirit with her
Spouse. Therefore to these souls that be disposed to these high feelings
Love has made of him this book in fulfilling of their desire.”

But even for those who have been initiated into this way of
illumination, the translator acknowledges that many things in the
_Mirror_ are difficult and obscure: “often he leaveth the nut and the
kernel within the shell unbroken, that is to say, that Love in this book
leaves to souls the touches of his divine works privily hid under dark
speech, for they should taste the deeper the draughts of his love and
drink; and also to make them have the more clear insight in divine
understandings to divine love, and declare himself.” Therefore he has
added his own explanations to the more difficult passages. “Where
meseems most need I will write more words thereto in manner of gloss
after my simple cunning as meseems best. And in these few places that I
put in more than I find written I will begin with the first letter of my
name M. and end with this letter N. the first of my surname.”

He ends with a gentle complaint of the badness of the text from which he
worked, and the confession that he has allowed himself a certain amount
of editorial liberty. “The French book that I shall write after is evil
written, and in some places for default of words and syllables the
reason is away. Also in translating of French some words need to be
changed, or it will fare ungoodly, not according to the sentence.
Wherefore I will follow the sentence according to the matter, as near as
God will give me grace; obeying me ever to the correction of Holy Kirk,
praying ghostly livers and clerks that they will vouchsafe to correct
and amend there that I do amiss.”

So much for M.N., the English mystic. The prologue of the author, which
comes next, tells us all that we know about the anonymous French writer
of the book. This person was of a very different temper from M.N. As a
Catholic scholar has observed of St. Teresa, “L’auteur ne se faisait pas
illusion sur le mèrite de son œuvre.” Like Teresa, he believed himself
to have written under immediate divine inspiration; a fact which
somewhat excuses his complacency in regard to the result. This is a
common claim with the mystics, in whom subconscious cerebration is
always exceptionally active, and whose writings often exhibit an
automatic and involuntary character, seeming to them the work of another
mind. Jacob Boehme, Madame Guyon, and Blake are obvious cases in point.
The author of the _Mirror_, however, was anxious that his claim to
inspiration should be endorsed. He therefore—most fortunately for
us—sent his work to various “learned clerks,” persons of importance in
the theological world, and chronicles their appreciatory remarks in the
prologue; which becomes in his hands a form of mediæval
“advance-notice.” It will be observed that his critics share the opinion
of M.N., that though full of “ghostly cunning” this is a dangerous work
to put into the hands of the plain man.

Of these critics “The first was a Friar Minor of great name, of life of
perfection. Men called him Friar John of Querayne.... He said soothly
that this book is made by the Holy Ghost. And though all the clerks of
the world heard it, but if they understand it, that is to say, but if
they have high ghostly feelings and this same working, they shall nought
wit what it means. And he prayed for the love of God that it be wisely
kept: and that but few should see it. And he said thus, that it was so
high that himself might not understand it. And after him a monk of
Cisetyns [Citeaux] read it, that hight Dan Frank, Chantor of the Abbey
of Viliers: and he said that it proved well by the Scripture that it is
all truth that this book says. And after him read it a Master of
Divinity, that hight Master Godfrey of Fountaynes: and he blamed it
nought, no more than did the other. But he said thus, that he counselled
nought [_sic_] that few should see it; and for this cause, for they
might leave their own working and follow this calling, to the which they
should never come, and so they might deceive themselves, for it is made
of a spirit so strong and so cutting, that there be but few such or
none.... For the peace of auditors was this proved, and for your peace
we say it to you. For this seed should bear holy fruit to them that hear
it and worthy be.”

Of the three persons here mentioned, Friar John and Dan Frank still
remain unidentified: but Godfrey of Fountaynes is almost certainly the
Master of Divinity, called Doctor Venerandus, who was a prominent member
of the University of Paris at the end of the thirteenth century. He was
at the height of his fame about 1280-1290, and died about 1306. “_Grande
lumen studii magister Godefridum de Fontanis_,” he is called in a letter
of 1301. In the great war between Friars and Seculars which divided the
University at the end of the thirteenth century, this Godfrey was one of
the bitterest opponents of the Mendicant Orders. He wrote against them,
and attacked them in the Synod of Paris in 1283. We see therefore that
the author of the _Mirror_, in placing Godfrey’s testimonial beside that
of Friar John, secured with a cunning other than ghostly a friend in
each of the opposing camps.

There is, however, one obvious and significant omission in this list of
patrons. There is no name which emanates directly from the great school
of St. Thomas Aquinas; supreme at that moment in the University, and the
custodian of orthodox philosophy. There is, indeed, little trace of
scholastic influence in the _Mirror_, which is far more in harmony with
the mystical theology favoured by St. Bonaventura, and continued during
the following century in the Franciscan schools: a fact which explains
at once the guarded approbation of Friar John, and the absence of
Dominican patronage. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the
Franciscans were eager students of and commentators on Dionysius the
Areopagite: and the order which produced and upheld the hardy
speculations of Duns Scotus might well look with indulgence on the most
extravagant statements of _The Mirror of Simple Souls_.

The original version of this book, then, was probably written in the
last quarter of the thirteenth century, and certainly before 1306. Its
writer was therefore the contemporary of Eckhart and Jacopone da Todi,
the great mystical lights of the Preaching and the Minor Friars. He was
no provincial recluse, but a person in touch with the intellectual life
of his time. He had connections with the University of Paris, but the
names of his patrons prove him to have been neither a member nor an
enemy of the Mendicant Orders. It is probable that he was a monk,
possible that he was a Carthusian; a strictly contemplative order
celebrated for its mystical leanings, which produced in the later Middle
Ages many students of the Dionysian writings, and many works upon
contemplation. He was widely read, and many parallels could be
established between his doctrines and the classics of Christian
mysticism. His lost book is so far our only evidence that abstruse prose
treatises of this kind were already written in the vernacular; and this
alone gives it great interest from the literary point of view. He was,
so far as we know, the first French mystic to write in French; the
forerunner of St. Francis de Sales, of Madame Guyon, of Malaval. If we
except the semi-mystical writings of Gerson, we must wait till the
seventeenth century to provide him with a worthy successor.


                                   II


We come next to the manner and content of the book. The manner is that
of a dramatic dialogue: an unusual if not unique form for works of this
kind. It consists of a debate—often a lively debate—between Love, the
Soul, Reason, and a few intervening characters, of whom Pure Courtesy
and Discretion are the chief. The student will at once be reminded of
the _Romaunt de la Rose_: but he will have difficulty in matching this
form within the confines of ascetic literature. Duologues, such as those
in the Third Book of the _Imitatio_, or Suso’s conversations with
Eternal Wisdom, are not uncommon: but I know of no other instance of an
elaborate mystical doctrine presented through the mouths of a group of
symbolic personages.

The Soul is naturally that of the author. Lady Love is his instructress,
and all the most beautiful passages are given to her. Reason’s rôle is
interrogatory. He catechises Love sharply though respectfully, and
represents the invariable attitude of common sense confronted by the
claims of mysticism. Sometimes he goes too far; Love or the Soul is
driven to put him in his place. “Oh, understanding of Reason!” says this
soul noughted, “what thou hast of rudeness! Thou takest the shell or the
chaff and leavest the kernel or the grain. Thine understanding is so
low, that thou mayst not so highly reach as them behoves that well would
have understanding of the Being that we speak of.” In general, however,
the figure of Reason is used with great art to elucidate the hard
sayings of Love. The alert intelligence of the writer notes all possible
objections to his doctrine, and states and refutes them out of the
mouths of his characters. “O Lady Love, what is this that you say?” says
the shocked voice of Reason whenever the argument becomes paradoxical or
abstruse. “Reason,” says Love to this, “I will answer for the profit of
them for whom thou makest to us this piteous request. Reason,” says
Love, “where be these double words that thou prayest me to discuss ...
it is well asked, and I will,” says Love, “answer thee to all thy
asking.”

What, then, is the doctrine which these discussions put before us? It is
the doctrine of the soul’s possible ascent from illusion to reality,
from separateness to union with the Divine: the primal creed of all
mysticism, here stated in its most extreme form, and pressed to its
logical conclusion. It offers, not a chart of the way to a distant
heaven of beatitude and recompense, but initiation into that state of
being wherein we find our heaven here and now. “I took Jesus for my
heaven,” said Julian of Norwich. So the writer of the _Mirror_:
“Paradise is no other thing than God Himself ... why was the thief in
Paradise anon as the soul was departed from his body?... He saw God,
that is Paradise; for other thing is not Paradise than to see God. And
this doth she [the soul] in sooth at all times that she is uncumbered of
herself.” The super-essential and unknowable Godhead, whose nature is
but partially revealed in the Blessed Trinity, is the only substance of
reality, and the only satisfaction of the soul’s desire. “Though this
soul had all the knowledge, love and learning that ever was given, or
shall be given, of the Divine Trinity, it should be naught as in regard
of that that she loves and shall love ... for there is no other God but
He that none may know, which may not be known.” The history of human
transcendence is the history of the soul’s transmutation to that
condition of love in which it is, as the author is not afraid to say,
deified; and so merged in the Reality from which it came forth, that it
is no longer aware of its own separate experience but is “all one spirit
with its Spouse.”

“I am God,” says Love, “for Love is God and God is Love. And this soul
is God by condition of love, and I am God by nature divine. And this is
hers by right-wiseness of love. So that this Precious, loved of me, is
learned and led by me out of herself, for she is turned to me, in me.”

This process is set forth by the writer of the _Mirror_ under three
chief heads: those of Liberty as the aim, the Will as the agent, and
Surrender as the method of the spiritual quest.

In the conception of Liberty as the supreme aim of the spiritual life we
have what is perhaps the most original feature of his work: though it is
a conception which is of course implicit in the New Testament. Where
most contemplatives lay emphasis on the glad servitude of love, and use
the symbols of wedlock to express the willing subjugation of the soul to
its Divine Bridegroom, the key of this book is the idea of spiritual
freedom; and that freedom as consisting in the liberation of man’s will
from finite desires that it may rejoin and lose itself within the Will
of the Infinite. We are to learn, it says in the first chapter,
something of “the pure love, of the noble love, and of the high love of
the _free_ soul; and how the Holy Ghost has His sail in his ship.” With
our “inward subtle understanding”—that spiritual intuition which is the
instrument of all real knowledge—we are to follow its progress from the
bondage of desire to the point at which, purged of self-will, perfected
in meekness and love, “noughted and abased,” it reaches the “Seventh
Estate of Grace,” and participates in the perfect liberty of Pure Being,
wherein “the soul has fulhead of perception by divine fruition in life
of peace.” “Not-willing” is the secret of liberation, and lord of our
true life. “And this not-willing sows in souls the Divine Seed,
fulfilled of the divine will of God. This seed may never fail, but few
souls dispose them to receive this seed.” Though this emancipation is
only attained by the utter surrender of all personal desire and
achievement, yet throughout the book the dominant note is of glad
liberation, of flying, of a rapturous ascent. As we read, we seem to
hear from every page “the thunder of new wings.” The free soul is
“six-winged like the seraphim.” She is “the eagle that flies high: so
right high and yet more high than does any other bird; for she is
feathered with fine love, and she beholds above other the beauty of the
sun, and the beams and the brightness of the sun. Dame Nature,” says
she, “I take leave of you: Love is me nigh, that holds me free of him
against all without dread. Then,” says Love, “she afraies her nought for
tribulation, nor stints for consolation.”

It is clear to the writer that only certain persons are capable of this
complete freedom in love: and it is to them—the natural mystics, the
people with a genius for reality—that his book is addressed. They are
“of that lineage that be folks royal,” “called without fail of the
Divine goodness,” and it is on their spiritual intuition, their
transcendent knowledge, that “all Holy Church is founded”; a suspicious
statement in the eyes of orthodox theology. They possess, or are able to
possess, the incommunicable gift of spiritual vision.

“This gift is given,” says Love, “sometimes in a moment of time. Who
that has it, keep it: for it is the most perfect gift that God gives to
creature.” So removed is the resulting perception of reality from human
wisdom that no one can teach the illuminated soul anything. “Now for
God,” says Reason, “Lady Love, say what is this to say? This is to say,”
says Love, “that this soul is of so great knowing that though she had
all the knowing of all creatures that ever were, be or shall be, she
would think it naught in regard of that that she loves.” Yet, true to
Neoplatonic principles, she is aware that her highest perceptions are
nothing, and her “right great and high words” but “gabbynge” or idle
talk, compared with the ineffable reality. She “wots all and wots
naught,” and is content it should be so. “He only is my God that none
can one word of say, nor all they of Paradise one only point attain nor
understand, for all the knowing that they have of Him.”

But though the Transcendent God is unknowable, the free soul, in
singular contradiction to contemporary asceticism, finds Him everywhere
immanent in the world. “And for this, that He is all in all, this soul,
says Love, finds Him over all. So that for this all things are to this
soul covetable, for she nor finds anything but she finds God.” So
Meister Eckhart: “To it all creatures are pure to enjoy; for it enjoyeth
all creatures in God and God in all creatures.”

The preliminary discipline of the mystic, the hard acquirement of that
“very charity” which is “the perfection of virtues” and “dwelleth always
in God’s sight ... obeying to nothing that is made but to love” is
little dwelt on by the author of the _Mirror_; who did not write for
beginners in the contemplative life, but for the mature soul whose love
has made him free, and who therefore needs “nor masses nor sermons nor
fasting nor orisons, and gives to nature all that he asks, without
grudging of conscience”—a practical application of St. Augustine’s
dangerous saying, “Love, and do what you like.” M.N., however,
interpolates a prudent reminder that “by this way and by sharp
contricion souls must go, or than they come to these divine usages.”

The author’s own instructions are really reducible to one point: the
complete and loving surrender of the individual will to the Primal
Will—detachment, or, as he calls it, the “noughting” of the soul. This
is that “peace of charity in life noughted,” which constitutes the
higher life of love; in contrast to the active life of virtue,
struggling to keep unbroken its attitude of charity to God and man. In
it the soul dwells, as do the Seraphim, within the divine atmosphere,
and has direct access to the sources of its life. “This is the proper
being of Seraphim: there is nought mediate between their love and the
Divine Love; they have always its tidings without means. So hath this
soul, that seeks not the divine science amongst the masters of the
world, but the world and herself inwardly despises. Ah, God! what great
difference it is between a gift given by means, of the Loved to the
Lover, and the gift given without means of the Loved to the Lover. This
book says sooth of this soul. It says she hath six wings as have the
Seraphim. With two she covers the face of our Lord: that is to say, the
more knowledge this soul hath of the Divine Goodness the more she knows
that she knows not the amount of a mote as in regard to His Goodness,
the which is not comprehended but of Himself. And with two she covers
His feet: this is to say, the more that this soul hath knowledge of the
sufferance that Jesu Christ suffered for us, the more perfectly she
knows that she knows naught, as in regard of it that He suffered for us,
the which is not known but of Him. And with two she flies, and so dwells
in standing and sitting: this is to say, that all she covets and loves
and prizes, it is the Divine Goodness. These be the wings that she flies
with, and so dwells in standing, for she is alway in the sight of God:
and sitting, for she dwells alway in the Divine Will. Whereof should
this soul have dread, though she be in the world? An the world, the
flesh, and our Enemy the Fiend, and the four elements, the birds of the
air and the beasts of the field, tormented her and despised her and
devoured her if it might so be, what might she lose if God dwelled with
her? Oh, is he not Almightiful? Yea, without doubt: He is all might, all
wisdom and all goodness, our Father and Brother and our true Friend.”

“This soul,” says Love, “can no more speak of God; for she is noughted
to all outward desires, and of all the affections of the spirit. So that
what this soul does, she does it by usage of good custom, and by
commandment of Holy Church, without any desire: for will is dead, that
gave her desire.... Who that asks these free souls, sure and peaceful,
if they would be in purgatory, they say nay. If they would living be
certified of their salvation, they say nay. Eh, what would they? They
have nothing of will, this for to will; and if they willed, they should
descend from Love: for He it is that hath their will.... Thus departs
the soul from her will and the will departs from this soul, so she again
puts it and gives and yields it in God where it was first.” Such a
doctrine easily slides into the complete passivity or “holy
indifference” which was the ideal of the seventeenth century Quietists:
and the _Mirror_ certainly does contain passages which, if taken alone,
would convict their author of a fondness for this heresy. “I certify
thee that these souls that fine love leads, they have as lief shame as
worship, and worship as shame; and poverty as riches and riches as
poverty; and torments of God and of His creatures as comforts of God and
of His creatures; and to be hated as loved, and loved as hated; and hell
as paradise and paradise as hell ... the free soul has no will to will
or unwill, but only to will the will of God and suffer in peace His
divine ordinance.”

Nevertheless, other passages make it clear that active surrender, not
mere passivity is the aim, and that the “noughting” of the self within
the All is a loving sacrifice, consistent with its achievement of
completest happiness. “True love has but only one intent; and that is,
that she might alway love truly, for of the love of her Lover has she no
doubt, that He does what best is. And she follows this: that she does
that that she ought to do. And she wills nought but one thing; and that
is, that the Will of God be alway in her done.... This soul,” says Love,
“swims in the sea of joy, that is, in the sea of delights, streaming of
divine influences. She feels no joy, for she herself is joy. She swims
and drenches in joy, for she lives in joy without feeling any joy. So is
joy in her, that she herself is joy, by the virtue of joy that has
merged her in Him. And so is the will of the Loved and the will of this
soul turned into one as fire and flame.”

The teaching of the writer seems to be, that so long as the will is
consciously active and desirous—however good its actions or desires—its
owner cannot be liberated from the illusions and anxieties of the
personal life. What he needs, if he did but know it, is reunion with
that fontal life from which he came, to which he is perpetually drawn by
love. Here his separate will finds its meaning, and is not annihilated
but absorbed. “The understanding, that gives light, shows to the soul
the thing that she loves. And the soul that receives by light of
understanding the nighing and the knitting by accord of union in
plenteous love, sees the Being, where that she holds to have her seat;
receiving gladly the light of knowing that brings her tidings of love.
And then she would become so, that she had but one will and love; and
that is, the only will of Him that she loves.”

The detached soul who is thus “noughted in God” enjoys a freedom from
stress, an immunity from disappointment incredible to those who still
live the individual life. “Now shall I say to you what they be that sit
in the mountain above the wind and the rain? These be they that have in
earth neither shame nor worship, nor dread of anything that befalls.”
She has, moreover, passed beyond that moral conflict which arises from
the discord between conscience and desire, and is the essential
character of the active life; for she has within her “the Master of
Virtues, that is called Divine Love, that has her merged in them all and
to Him united.” Thus she is able to say, “Virtues, I take leave of you
for evermore. Now shall my heart be more free and more in peace than it
has been. Forsooth, I wot well your service is too travaillous. Sometime
I laid my heart in you without any dissevering: ye wot well this. I was
in all thing to you obedient. O, I was then your servant: but now I am
delivered out of your thralldom.”

M.N. is quick to gloss this dangerous declaration: “I am stirred here to
say more to the matter ... when a soul gives her to perfection, she
labours busily day and night to get virtues by counsel of reason, and
strives with vices at every point, at every word and deed ... thus the
virtues be mistresses and every virtue makes her to war with her
contrary.... But so long one may bite on the bitter bark of the nut that
at last he shall come to the sweet kernel. Right so, ghostly to
understand, it fares with these souls that be come to peacefulness. They
have so long striven with vices and wrought by virtues that they be come
to the nut’s kernel, that is to say, to the love of God, which is
sweetness. And when the soul has deeply tasted this love ... then is she
mistress and lady over the virtues, for she has them all within herself
... and then this soul takes leave of virtues, as of thralldom and
painful travail ... and now she is lady and sovereign and they be
subjects.”

In the technical language of mysticism she has passed from the active to
the contemplative life, the crucial phase in the evolution of man’s
transcendental consciousness. This evolution is described for us with
great psychological exactness in the _Mirror_, under the traditional
formula of the “States” of the soul’s ascent. Since few mystics have
escaped the mania for significant numbers, one is not surprised to find
seven steps on this “steep stairway of love.” “I am called,” says this
soul, “of the touchings of Love, something to say of the Seven Estates
that we call beings: for so it is. And these be the degrees by which man
climbs from the valley, to the top of the mountain that is so several
[apart] that it sees but God.”

“The First Estate is, That a soul is touched of God by grace and
dissevered from sin: and, as to her power, in intention to keep the
commandments of God.” This is, of course, equivalent to the conversion
or change of heart which begins the spiritual life.

“The Second is, that a soul hold what God counsels to His special
lovers, passing that what he commands. And he is no good lover that
demenes him not to fulfill all that the which he wist might best please
to his Beloved.

“The Third is, that a soul holds the affection of love of works of
perfection, by which her spirit is ripened by desires: taking the love
of these works to multiply in her. And what does the subtlety of her
thought, but makes it seem to the understanding of her humble affection,
that she cannot make offering to her Love that might comfort her, but of
thing that He loves: for other gift is not prized in love.

“The Fourth is that a soul is drawn by highness of love into delight of
thought by meditation, and relinquishes all labours outward, and
obedience to others, by highness of love in contemplation. Then the soul
is dangerous, noble and delicious: in which she may not suffer that
anything her touch but the touchings of pure delight of love, in the
which she is singularly gladsome and jolly. What marvel is it if this
soul be upheld and updrawed thus graciously? Love makes her all drunken,
that suffers her not to attend but to Him.” These four stages have
brought the self to the complete practice of the contemplative life, and
prepared the way for that second great phase in the achievement of
reality which consists in the surrender of the separate will.

“The Fifth is, that a soul beholds what God is, and His Goodness, by
Divine Light. She sees the Will, by the spreading illumination of Divine
Light, the which light gives her the will again to put in God this will;
which she may not without this light yield, that may not her profit
unless she departs from her own will. Thus departs the soul from her
will, and the will departs from this soul, so she again puts it and
gives and yields it in God, where it was first.

“Now is this soul fallen of love into nought, without the which nought,
she may not all be. The which falling is so perfectly fallen, if she be
fallen aright, that the soul may not arise out of this deepness, nor she
ought not to do it. Within she ought to dwell. And then leaves the soul
pride and play, for the spirit has become bitter, that suffers her no
more to be playing nor jolly; for the spirit is departed from her that
made her oft love in the highness of contemplation, and in the fourth
estate fierce and dangerous.” Here the spirit of the mystic experiences
that terrible and characteristic reaction from the exalted joys of
contemplation which is sometimes called the “mystic death” or “dark
night of the soul,” and destroys in it the last roots of selfhood. In
this stage she completes the abandonment or “self-noughting” which
initiate her into that which the German mystics called “the Upper School
of the Holy Spirit.” Thence she passes to the Sixth Estate, of union
with the Divine life, in so far as it can be achieved by those still in
the flesh. The Seventh is that indescribable state of “glory” or
super-essential life, which constitutes the beatific vision of the
Saints, known only of those that “be fallen of love into this being.”

“The Sixth is, that a soul sees neither her nought by deepness of
meekness, nor God by highful bounty. But God sees it in her of His
Divine Majesty that illuminated her of Him. So that she sees that none
is, but God Himself. And then is a soul in the Sixth Estate of all
things made free, pure and illuminated. Not glorified, for gloryfying is
in the Seventh Estate, that we shall have in glory that none can speak
of. But, pure and clarified, she sees nor God nor herself: but God sees
this of Him, in her, for her, withouten her, that shows her that there
is none but He. Nay, she knows but Him, nor she loves but Him, nor she
praises but Him, for there is but He. And the Seventh keeps He within
Him, for to give us in everlasting glory. If we wit it not now, we shall
wit it when the body our soul leaves.”


                                   II
                     THE BLESSED ANGELA OF FOLIGNO


It is a curious fact that in the modern revival of interest in the
Franciscan movement, little attention has been paid to the life and
works of Angela of Foligno. Yet, excepting only St. Bonaventura, this
woman has probably exerted a more enduring, more far-reaching influence
than any other Franciscan of the century which followed the Founder’s
death. In saying this, I do not forget the claims of such great
Franciscans as John of Parma or Jacopone da Todi, nor yet of St. Clare,
the Founder of the Second Order. But the influence of John of Parma was
comparatively short-lived; and that of Jacopone’s superb poetry, though
great in Italy, did not go beyond it. His ecstasies could not be
translated into other tongues. As to St. Clare, with whom the feminine
aspect of the Franciscan ideal first showed itself, her vocation was to
the foundation of a contemplative order, which should support by its
heavenly correspondences the active and missionary life of the
Franciscan friars. The business of the Second Order is the essential
woman’s business, of keeping the fire of love alight upon the hearth.
Its influence, therefore, was and is almost entirely confined within the
boundaries of the spiritual family. The deepest wells of Franciscan
mysticism are there hidden, and must always be hidden, from the outer
world.

But the vocation of Angela of Foligno was, in a sense, more thoroughly
Franciscan than this, more broadly human, more complete. Like that of
St. Catherine of Genoa, a mystic whom she resembles in certain respects,
it was a twofold vocation: to the eternal and to the temporal, to the
divine and to the human. She was a great contemplative, but she was also
an exceedingly successful teacher of the secrets of the spiritual life:
one of the great line of artist-mediators between the infinite and the
human mind.

We know nothing of St. Clare’s mystical experience. We know of Angela’s
all that she was able to express; and she tried hard, though for want of
language she confesses that she often failed. This passionate, faulty,
very human woman, who came to the Mystic Way from a disorderly life, and
was hampered by a natural egotism which she transmuted, it is true, but
never perhaps really killed, has earned the great title of “Mistress of
Theologians.” She penetrated to that world of realities which the
diagrams of theology, like the temple built with hands, foreshadow upon
earth. Her book of visions and revelations, now so little read,
profoundly affected the religious life of Europe. During the sixteenth
and the seventeenth century we often come upon its traces in England and
in France, as well as in Italy itself; for in this period it was one of
the most widely circulated religious works. It exerted great influence
on St. Francis de Sales, and also upon the French Quietists. It is
quoted as an authority by Madame Guyon, Poiret, and Malaval; and through
the great English Benedictine, Augustine Baker, and his pupil, Gertrude
More, it has left its mark on the English Catholic mysticism of the
seventeenth century.

This book is practically our only trustworthy source for the facts of
Angela’s inner and outer life. It was written in Latin, at her
dictation, by her Franciscan confessor Fra Arnaldo; at some date
subsequent to 1294, since it dates a past event by the pontificate of
Celestine V. It was not printed till the sixteenth century, when first
an Italian translation, and then the Latin text appeared. Both soon
became popular; the translation being one of the first Italian books of
devotion to appear in the vulgar tongue. It is divided into three parts,
which must be read in relation with one another. First we have the
history of Angela’s conversion, penitence, and slow, difficult education
in the mystic way: a detailed psychological document of much interest.
Secondly we have, grouped together, all the visions and revelations
which she received in that way. Unfortunately Fra Arnaldo has seen fit
to arrange these according to their subjects, and not according to the
order in which they were experienced; thereby increasing their edifying
character at the expense of their scientific worth. Last comes “the
evangelical doctrine of the Blessed Angela”; a treatise largely made up
of letters addressed to her disciples, but, like the writings of St.
Teresa, full of illuminating autobiographical touches.

Here, then, we have in one volume three aspects of human life as seen
within the limits of one personality: the biographical facts, the
supernal vision, and the ordered conclusions drawn from those facts and
that vision, for the instruction of other men. All are of value to us in
our study of her personality; for we shall never understand her as a
mystic unless we try first to understand her as a human creature.

First as to her outward life. Angela was born of a prosperous Umbrian
family in 1248; twenty-two years after the death of St. Francis,
seventeen years before the birth of Dante. She was one year younger than
St. Margaret of Cortona, the other great Franciscan penitent and
contemplative. Her life, covering the second half of the thirteenth
century, was roughly contemporary with that of Jacopone da Todi, who was
twenty years her senior; and with those “spiritual” friars, such as
Conrad of Offida and John of La Verna, who are commemorated in the
“Little Flowers.” The period, in Italy, was one of contrasted worldly
luxury and spiritual enthusiasm, and Angela’s life-history appears to
have included experience of both extremes. She married when very young
and had children, but lived a thoroughly worldly if not an actually
immoral life: posing before society as an excellent Christian, but
actually denying herself few indulgences. We learn from the list of sins
of which she afterwards accused herself, that these “infirmities and
diseases” had included the washing of her face, the curling, braiding,
washing, combing, and anointing of her hair, wearing of “needless vain
and curious clothes,” and laced shoes adorned with cut leather. She had
also incurred the risk of hell by “vain running and dancing and walking
about for pleasure,” and even by enjoying the scent of flowers: a crime
which St. Francis could hardly have condemned. Remembering the intensely
ascetic tone of Franciscan penitence and the puritan ideals of the
Spiritual zealots, we need not take these confessions too seriously, or
interpret in the worst sense the “embraces, touches, and other evil
deeds” which she deplores. Nevertheless, the unregenerate Angela in
early womanhood was not the kind of person whom one would pick out as
likely to develop into a saint. She makes it quite clear to us that she
was a vain, self-important, and hypocritical little egotist, “painted in
false colours, a dissembler within and without.” Probably, like many
women of the world, a nominal Tertiary, she loved to make a pious
impression, but loved comfort even more. “I diligently made an outward
show of being poor, but caused many sheets and coverings to be put down
where I slept, and taken up in the morning so that none might see them.”
There was an offensive sanctimoniousness about her too. “During the
whole of my life,” she says frankly, “I have studied how that I might
obtain the fame of sanctity.”

We do not know the date of Angela’s conversion, or the circumstances
which brought it about; save that it took place under Franciscan
influence, which was of course paramount in that part of Umbria in her
day. It seems to have taken the form of a gradual awakening of
conscience to the sinfulness and hypocrisy of her life. In her mental
distress she prayed to St. Francis, and he appeared to her in a dream,
the earliest of her visionary experiences; the confessor to whom she
then went for advice was a Friar Minor, and after her husband’s death
she adopted the plain habit worn by the more fervent Tertiaries, and
remained faithful to the Order till her death. The fixed dates in her
life are few and confusing. Her own book only gives two: the date of her
final purification and the date of her death. We gather from this and
other sources, however, that after her widowhood she lived at first with
one companion in great retirement; but by about 1290, had formed a small
sisterhood in Foligno. Its members, who observed Franciscan poverty in
its full rigour, took the rule of the Third Order and the three vows of
religion, but they were not cloistered. They devoted themselves to the
care of the sick, and other works of charity.

In this community Angela spent the rest of her life; gradually becoming
known as a teacher of “Seraphic wisdom” amongst those Spiritual
Franciscans who were struggling to keep the ideals of St. Francis alive.
She seems to have been the centre of a group of Franciscan Tertiaries of
both sexes, for whom she was at once friend and prophetess, like St.
Catherine of Siena in the next century. Several of her letters to these
“sons” of hers are embedded in her book of “Evangelical Doctrine.” One
of them, the turbulent and ardent friar Ubertino da Casale, owed to her
his true initiation into the spiritual life: and his account of the
impression which she made on him helps us to understand the nature of
her influence. He came to her from Paris in 1298, when he was
twenty-five years old; a successful preacher, but already conscious of
the inward call to a life of greater perfection. “She restored,” he
says, “a thousandfold all those spiritual gifts I had lost through my
own sins; so that from that time I have not been the same man that I was
before. When I had experienced the splendour of her radiant virtue, she
changed the whole face of my mind, and so drove out the weakness and
languor from my soul and body and healed my mind that was torn with
distraction, that no one who knew me before could doubt that the Spirit
of Christ was newly begotten in me through her.” This is almost our only
glimpse of Angela as she was seen by contemporary eyes: but it indicates
the position she came to occupy among the more devout Franciscan
_zelanti_.

She died, surrounded by her spiritual children, in the octave of the
Feast of the Holy Innocents, 1309, aged sixty-one; and was buried in the
Church of the Franciscans at Foligno, where her body still lies. An
Office in her honour was approved by Gregory XIV in 1701, and her Feast
is kept throughout the Franciscan Order on March 30.

So much for the scanty outer history. Of greater interest is our
knowledge of her inner life; the real life of mystics and
contemplatives. The history of this inner life assures us that Angela
was of the stuff of which great mystics are made; though not at all of
the stuff of which many amateurs of mysticism expect them to be made.
First great necessity, she possessed a strongly romantic temperament;
like St. Francis, Suso, St. Ignatius, Mechthild, St. Teresa, her
companions on the highway of the soul. Like these, she had also an
innate simplicity and ardour, a character at once childlike and heroic;
that “all-or-none” reaction, the power of total self-giving to the
matter in hand, which distinguishes the hero, whether as man of action,
as artist, or as saint. Indeed, heroism may properly be ascribed to a
comfortable and self-indulgent married woman, who leaves all for the
lonely adventure of Sinai, however many tumbles she may have upon the
road. With this courage she combined an extreme sensibility to
impressions, great power of endurance, a strong will; all the
potentialities of a great sinner or a great saint. Further, she
evidently possessed that peculiar, unstable psychic makeup, which the
mystic shares with other types of genius; and which is seen in its full
development in the two greatest of Italian saints, Francis of Assisi and
Catherine of Siena. She experienced all the normal episodes of complete
mystical development: the phases of penitence and self-discipline,
illumination and dereliction, and at last that ecstatic union with the
Divine Nature which is the goal of the Way. Her mysticism was deeply
coloured by the Franciscan atmosphere in which it was nurtured; it
exhibited the highly emotional and enthusiastic character, the tendency
to eccentric penances, the concentration upon the Cross and Passion of
Christ, which are found in her contemporary Jacopone da Todi, and are
typical of the Franciscan mystics at their best. Indeed, the many
parallels between Angela and Jacopone suggest to us that the favourite
subjects of their contemplations were those in vogue in “Spiritual”
circles at this time; and that we have in their works the surviving
examples of a complete school of mysticism, which taught, as Ubertino da
Casale says that Cecilia of Florence did, “the whole art of the higher
contemplation.”

“As I walked,” said the Blessed Angela, “by the way of penitence, I took
eighteen spiritual steps before I came to _know_ the imperfections of my
life.” This is the first sentence of the book of _Conversion and
Penitence_ which analyses in detail the changes through which she passed
on her way to complete self-knowledge and self-adjustment. Those
“eighteen steps” extended over many years. When they began, Angela was
living luxuriously, as a married woman, in her husband’s house. When
they ended, she was a poor widow vowed to the religious life; stripped
of every superfluity, everything that would entangle her in the web of
appearance, apt in contemplation, companioned by visions, esteemed as a
teacher and an ecstatic, and the centre of a group of disciples. Her
inner life, during these years of ascent, of hard and difficult growth,
seems to have been a life of bitter and almost continuous struggle. Even
after the preliminary steps of repentance were over, and her visionary
powers had developed, the new spiritual ideals demanded of her ever more
difficult renunciations. We see her, as we read the wonderful memoirs of
her years of penitence, perpetually flung to and fro between adoration
and contrition; as first one element and then the other of her complex
personality took the upper hand. In her long and slow ascent towards the
stars, she alternately experienced the sunshine and the shade.

From the turmoil which surrounded the hard re-making of Angela’s
character, there emerged two great principles round which her subsequent
life and teaching were to be grouped. The first was poverty, the second
was self-knowledge. Naturally her instinct for poverty would be fostered
by her Franciscan environment; but it is an instinct implicit in the
mystical temperament, and not peculiar to the Poor Man of Assisi.
Mystics know that possessions dissipate the energy which they need for
other and more real things; that they must give up ownership, the verb
“to have,” if they are to attain the freedom which they seek, and all
the fullness of the verb “to be.” Thus Jacopone in his great ode
expressed a universal spiritual law:

                           “Povertate è nulla avere
                         e nulla cosa poi volere;
                         ed omne cosa possedere
                         en spirito de libertate.”

It cost Angela many struggles before she fully accepted and acted upon
this truth, and attained that which she calls the “liberty of poverty.”
Self-knowledge, that hard essential of the soul’s re-education which
Richard of St. Victor, and afterwards St. Catherine of Siena, made the
starting-point of all mysticism, she recognized from the first as the
true objective towards which her hard penances and long meditations must
tend.

The eighteen “steps,” then, exhibit with extraordinary honesty her
gradual progress in these two arts of self-knowledge and renunciation.
At the first step, as we have seen, she was by something—we know not
what—startled into attention to the real, and terrified by the vision of
her own naked reality stripped of its pleasant veils and self-deceits.
Her first reaction to this vision was avoidance. She was ashamed to look
her sins in the face, or confess them. But having prayed to St. Francis,
she was led by a dream—the form under which her unconscious mind most
frequently controlled her—to seek a Franciscan friar and make a general
confession of her sins. She performed his penance loyally, and became
increasingly contrite for her faults: the sense of Divine Mercy touching
her, and evoking an ever more humble and repentant grief. By the eighth
step this contrition had become love, the passion for perfection
triumphing over the hatred of imperfection. By that contemplation of the
Cross which was specially dear to Franciscan devotion, and is the
subject of one of Jacopone’s most splendid poems, she was led into an
ever deeper understanding of the mystery of redemption by pain. Angela
was now definitely committed to the mystic way. “In this beholding of
the Cross,” she says, “I burned with the fire of love and remorse: so
that standing before that Cross I divested myself of everything and
offered myself to Him ... and the aforesaid fire compelled me, and I had
no power to resist.” The special form which her renunciation took—that
of a vow of chastity in deed and thought—suggests the direction in which
her chief temptations lay; and this deduction is made more probable by
the emotional quality of her visionary experience, in which the
repressed ardours of her temperament found relief.

At the ninth step, this instinct for renunciation achieved more complete
expression. “Enlightened and instructed”—doubtless by some member of the
spiritual group—she learned that nothing less than a total sacrifice of
friends, kindred, possessions, her very self, would serve her if she
wished to tread the Way of Holy Cross. But in her acceptance of this
bitter truth we still see something of the vanity, self-importance and
narrow egotism of the old Angela. This is the one passage in all her
writings which every one knows, and by which she is generally, and most
unfairly, judged.

“I elected to walk on the thorny path which is the path of tribulation.
So I began to put aside the fine clothing and adornments which I had,
and the most delicate food, and also the covering of my head. But as
yet, to do all these things was hard, and shamed me, because I did not
feel much love for God, and was living with my husband. So that it was a
bitter thing to me when anything offensive was said or done to me; but I
bore it as patiently as I could. In that time, and by God’s will, there
died my mother, who was a great hindrance to me in following the way of
God; my husband died likewise; and in a short time there also died all
my children. And because I had begun to follow the aforesaid way, and
had prayed God to rid me of them, I had great consolation of their
deaths, although I also felt some grief; wherefore, because God had
shown me this grace, I imagined that my heart was in the heart of God
and His will and His heart in my heart.”

This unfortunate paragraph outweighs for many minds the whole of
Angela’s subsequent life and achievements. I do not deny that, taken
alone, it appears to be a monument of spiritual egotism. But we must
remember that it represents, not Angela the peaceful mystic, but Angela
the worried and storm-tossed penitent at the most difficult moment of
her career. The emotional centre of her life had shifted. An inexorable
inner voice now urged her to a total concentration on God, and she knew
that the way of penance and renunciation was her only hope. Yet living
in a thoroughly discordant, thoroughly unspiritual environment, hemmed
in on all sides by conventional existence and unsympathetic
surroundings, this way seemed impossible to follow in its completeness;
for she was not one of those who are able to harmonize the demands of
both worlds. Moreover, these words were written by one who had long
outlived the human sorrow which, as she says here and in another place,
she felt at these accumulated bereavements. Now, looking back and seeing
her past existence spread out before her, she recognized even this awful
and drastic series of deprivations as a necessary factor in the life to
which she was called.

After all, it is fair to acknowledge that family affection is not the
strongest point in the character of the mystical saints. In the
interests of their vocation, they are always ready to leave father,
mother, brothers, and sisters; and moreover there is evangelical
authority for this attitude. They are specialists, and are therefore
bound, in the interests of the race, to give up many things which other
men must develop and preserve. Artists are under much the same
necessity. The vitality which we diffuse amongst many interests and
loves, these must concentrate on the one object of their quest. Hence
St. Francis himself flung his family aside without scruple when it came
to the parting of the ways. Hence Jacopone da Todi was warned that even
spiritual friendships must be held lightly by the pilgrim on the way of
the Cross. Angela was only following in their footsteps, though she
doubtless expressed herself with unnecessary and ill-regulated vigour,
when she recognized human ties and human affections as possible
impediments of the spiritual life. An easy capitulation to love and
friendship in their most engrossing aspects seems always to have been
her standing danger. It caused her in later life to say that she “feared
love more than all other things”; even regarding with suspicion the deep
affection which unites teacher and disciples, or two fellow-initiates of
the contemplative life.

It was after her release from the duties of family life, and her more
complete concentration on the ascetic life, that her visionary powers
began to develop. At first they were little more than waking dreams of a
commonplace kind; imaginary pictures of the Passion, the Crucifix, the
Sacred Heart, such as have been experienced by innumerable Catholic
saints. These vivid symbolic presentations of Divine love moved Angela
to greater and more heroic heights of penitential love; and the passion
for complete evangelical poverty came on her with renewed force. Her
possessions enchained her, and she knew it. She made many efforts to
screw herself up bit by bit to those heights of renunciation which St.
Francis seems to have reached almost without effort.

“For this cause—namely, to have the liberty of poverty—I journeyed to
Rome, to pray the Blessed Peter that he would obtain for me the grace of
true poverty. It seemed to me at last that I could not sufficiently do
penance whilst I was possessed of worldly things ... so I determined to
forsake everything. In my imagination I had a great desire to become
poor, and such was my zeal, that I often feared to die before I attained
this state of poverty. On the other hand, I was assailed by temptations,
which whispered to me that I was still young, that begging for alms
might lead me into shame and danger; that if I did this, I should die of
hunger, cold, and nakedness. Moreover, all my friends dissuaded me from
it. But at last Divine mercy sent a great illumination into my heart,
which, as I believed then and do now, I shall never lose even in
eternity.... So then I did resolve in good earnest.”

Here is the final, deliberate act of will: the turning once for all from
the unreal to the real—under whatever form the charms of unreality
appear to the growing self—which all mystics have to make. It was
Angela’s eleventh step. Her mystical powers were now developing rapidly.
They showed themselves in visions, dreams, and ecstasies. Not all of
these, it is true, can be accepted as marks of spiritual growth: for
some clearly represent the re-emergence under religious symbols of old
emotions and desires. But the deep and vivid intuitions of spiritual
realities which came to her more and more frequently, show that a steady
sublimation of those emotions and desires was in progress, and that they
tended more and more towards supersensual ends.

At the fifteenth step, with truly Franciscan thoroughness—though, oddly
enough, the Friars Minor whom she consulted forbade her to do it—she
distributed the whole of her possessions amongst the poor. “Because
methought I could not keep anything for myself without greatly offending
Him who did thus enlighten me.” With this crucial act she seems to have
attained at last the true and full state of illumination. “Then,” she
says, “I began to feel the sweetness of God in my heart”: that which
other mystics have called the “sense of the Presence.” Also, “I began to
have understanding of the visions and the words”; a new spiritual
lucidity running side by side with the symbolic pictures and imaginary
voices that she saw and heard with the inner eye and ear. This, too, is
normal and characteristic. From this point, then, we must read the book
of _Visions and Consolations_ side by side with the book of _Penances_
if we would understand Angela’s inner life; for these two forms of
experience, which she has unfortunately chosen to treat separately,
alternated with one another.

In the time of her total acceptance of holy poverty, Angela seems to
have been living in a state of almost hermit-like simplicity with one
companion, the Blessed Paschalina of Foligno; whom at first she found a
“weariness,” but afterwards discovered to be a fellow traveller on the
Mystic Way. Some years had now passed since her conversion; and she was
already accepted—perhaps indeed celebrated—as a religious teacher among
the members of the Spiritual group. Definitely vowed to the service of
the Franciscan Order, she seems soon to have become like St. Catherine
of Siena, St. Catherine of Genoa, and many other women mystics, the
centre of a group of adoring disciples or “spiritual sons.” Yet her
inner life was still in a state of confusion, the remaking of her
character was still in progress. She was flung perpetually to the
extremes of joy and anguish. She would rise to great heights of mystical
passion “filled with the fire and fervour of Divine love,” only to fall
back to her old temptations. The repressed instinctive life began to
take its revenge, and tortured her by vicious suggestions which she had
never known before. “I would have chosen rather to be roasted than to
endure such pains.” Also the great strain put upon her nervous system by
the growing spiritual faculties resulted in absolute physical illness,
as has been the case with many of the mystical saints. “The torments of
my body,” she says, “were veritably numberless. There remained not one
of my members that was not grievously tormented, nor was I ever free
from pain, infirmity, or weariness.”

We need not be afraid to recognize in this struggle a reflection of the
stresses and difficulties—some physical—which attend on the complete
sublimation of man’s psychic life; especially in persons of a strongly
emotional temperament. In Angela’s case the visions and dreams that
accompanied it assure us of the character of the crisis through which
she was passing. Many of her symptoms at this time were undoubtedly
hysterical. She cried aloud when she heard the name of God, and fell
into a fever on seeing a picture of the Passion of Christ. Her tears
were perpetual, and often she longed to tear herself in pieces.
Unfortunately Franciscan piety of the more extreme sort encouraged
emotional extravagances of this kind, as we may see by the account of
Angela’s contemporaries given in the “Little Flowers,” and failed to
appreciate Jacopone’s profound distinction between ordered and
disordered love. It also gave unqualified approval to those public and
grotesque acts of self-abasement which play so large a part in the
legend of his penitence; and here again, Angela was true to type. Still
grieved by the memory of her old hypocrisies, made more poignant by the
reverence she received from her disciples, she went through the city and
open places with meat and fishes hanging from her neck, and crying, “I
am that woman full of evil and dissembling, slave of all vices and
iniquities, who did good deeds that she might obtain honour among men;
and especially when I caused those bidden to my house to be told that I
ate neither fish nor meat, and—being the while greedy, gluttonous, and
drunken—feigned to desire nought but what was needful.”

Those familiar with the lives of the mystics will remember many
parallels to this state of conflict: the ups and downs of Suso, his
alternate illumination and despair, his great self-denials balanced by
foolish little sins: the thirty years during which Teresa—already, like
Angela, regarded as a great example—swayed between her mystical vocation
and the claims of a more normal life. In Angela this inward battle
culminated, she says, “some little while before the time of the
pontificate of Celestino”—that is to say about 1294, when she was
forty-six—and endured for more than two years. In it, in addition to
bodily and mental agony, she was humiliated by recurrent temptations to
sensual indulgence. Her depression was extreme, and her intellect often
so clouded that she could not even recall the idea of God to her mind.
It was her last lesson in humility and self-knowledge—an excellent
antidote to the dangers of professional sanctity—and answered to that
terrible period of final purification which other mystics have called
the “Dark Night of the Soul.”

From this last purgation, in which all the elements of her character
seemed flung back into the melting-pot, she emerged into that condition
of spiritual equilibrium, of perfect harmony with transcendent reality,
which is known to mystic writers as the Unitive Way. “A divine change,”
she says, “took place in my soul, which neither saint nor angel could
describe or explain. Wherefore I say again that it seems to me evil
speaking or blasphemy if I try and tell of it.” Again, “I came not to
this state of my own self, but was led and drawn thereto by God; so that
though of my own self I should not have known how to desire or ask for
it, I am now in that state continually.” Though the capacity for pain
never left her, and is implied in many of her greatest revelations—for,
like all the great Catholic mystics, she found the Christian paradox of
joyous suffering at the very centre of truth—yet the last twelve years
of her life seem to have been years of profound inward peace. “He hath
placed within my soul,” she said, “a state which changes little, and I
possess God in such fullness that I am no longer in the state in which I
used to be; but I walk in such perfect peace of heart and mind that I am
content in all things.”

It was that state of which Jacopone has written:

                            “La guerra è terminata
                          de le virtú battaglia,
                          de la mente travaglia
                          cosa nulla contende.
                          La mente è renovata
                          vestita a tal entaglia,
                          de tal ferro è la maglia
                          feruta no l’offerende.”

Angela has two claims to the title of a great mystic: that of her life,
which we have briefly considered, and that of the revelations and
experiences which she reports; our chief evidence of the unique nature
of her consciousness. What then was the nature of these visions and
revelations? There are signs in her book that she ran through the whole
gamut of mystical experience. She practised, and described, all those
degrees of contemplative prayer which are analyzed by St. Teresa and St.
John of the Cross. She heard interior voices. She saw visions. She was
an ecstatic. Moreover, at least after her achievement of spiritual
equilibrium—for it would be unfair to take into account the morbid
states from which she suffered during the period of readjustment—her
ecstasies were of that rare and supernal kind which, far from being
signs of mental or nervous disease, actually renew and invigorate the
physical life of those who experience them. There is a beautiful passage
in the life of St. Catherine of Genoa in which she is described as
coming joyous and rosy-faced from the ecstatic encounter with God’s
love. So Angela says: “Because of the change in my body, therefore I was
not able to conceal my state from my companion, or from other people
with whom I consorted; because at times my face was all resplendent and
rosy, and my eyes shone like candles. When the soul is assured of God
and refreshed by His presence, the body also receives health,
satisfaction, and nobility.”

Her revelations were of two kinds. First we have a long series of
“imaginary visions”: pictures, no doubt representing deep and imageless
intuitions, resulting as it were from some communion with reality, but
taking their form—as distinct from their content—from the memory and
imagination of the visionary. Though many of these must be classed as
dreams, and some indeed were received in sleep, others were definite
experiences; seen, as she says, with the eyes of the mind, far more
clearly than anything can be seen with the eyes of the body.
Nevertheless we are bound to consider them less as objective revelations
than as vivid artistic reconstructions; symbols of something that she
has felt and known. Angela’s religious beliefs and romantic leanings are
both clearly reflected in them. Some deal with the physical accidents of
the Passion—always a favourite subject of the mediæval visionary—and
these closely resemble the series of Passion-pictures seen by Julian of
Norwich. Others are inspired by her devotion to the Eucharist. One or
two seem, like the Visions of St. Gertrude, to anticipate the later cult
of the Sacred Heart. In virtue of these visions Angela belongs to the
great family of women Catholic mystics; women possessing a rich
emotional life, and, largely by means of that emotional life,
actualizing and expressing their communion with the spiritual world.

We see this emotional character clearly in one of Angela’s most
celebrated experiences; the one of all others which seems to have set
the seal on her career as a religious teacher, and which is placed at
the beginning of her book of visions and revelations, though there was
no vision involved in it. I mean the beautiful scene in which she talked
with the Holy Ghost, walking on “the narrow road which leads upward to
Assisi, and is beyond Spello.” That sense of heavenly intimacy, of
divine communion, of a destiny pressed upon her from the spiritual
sphere, which then took possession of her consciousness, was translated
by the surface-mind of the natural Angela—whose nearest parallels to
such an experience were found amongst the emotional incidents of human
love—into the wonderful imaginary conversation in which, as she climbs
the path between the vineyards, she is wooed by the Holy Spirit, and
assured of His peculiar interest and affection. “I will bear thee
company and speak with thee all the way,” He says to her. “I will make
no end to My speaking, and thou wilt not be able to attend to anything
save Me.” “Then did He begin to speak the following words to me, which
persuaded me to love after this manner, ‘My daughter, who art sweet to
Me, My daughter who art My temple, My beloved daughter, do thou love Me,
for I love thee greatly, and much more than thou lovest Me.’ And very
often He said to me, ‘Bride and daughter! sweet art thou to Me; I love
thee better than any other in the valley of Spoleto.’ These and other
similar things did He say to me. Then when I heard these words, I
counted my sins, and I considered my faults; how that I was unworthy of
so great a love. And I began to doubt these words; for which cause, my
soul said to Him who had spoken to it, ‘If thou wert indeed the Holy
Spirit, thou wouldest not speak thus; for it is not right or proper,
because I am weak and frail and might grow vainglorious thereat.’ He
answered, ‘Think and see if thou couldst become vainglorious because of
the things for which thou art now made glad....’ Then I tried to grow
vainglorious, that I might prove if He spoke truth; and I began to look
at the vineyards, that I might learn the folly of my words. And wherever
I looked, He said to me, ‘Behold and see! this is My creation’: and at
this I felt ineffable delight.”

This is the poetry of mysticism, an artistic reduction of supernal
intuitions, and is to be interpreted in poetic terms. But there is
another, and rarer, form of spiritual perception: that imageless
intuition of pure truth, which St. Teresa and other mystics call
intellectual, but which would be better named metaphysical vision.
Angela’s real importance amongst the mystics comes from the fact that
she possessed this power in a high degree of development. In virtue of
her immediate apprehensions of transcendent reality, she belongs to the
rarest and highest type of mystic seer: a class in which Plotinus holds
perhaps the first place, and of which Ruysbroeck is the most conspicuous
mediæval example. The poetry of Jacopone da Todi shows us that he too
knew the secret of those strange astounding regions, “beyond the polar
circle of the mind,” where Angela tasted of unconditioned reality, and
the language in which he describes them often reminds us of her. It is
an interesting question, whether these two great Franciscan
contemplatives directly influenced one another, or must be regarded as
the twin stars of a school of “Seraphic wisdom” which taught the deepest
mysteries of the spiritual life.

There are eight of these great visionary experiences recorded in
Angela’s book. In them she says that she apprehended God successively
under the attributes of Goodness, Beauty, Power, Wisdom, Love, Justice;
and that after this she beheld the totality of the Godhead “darkly”—a
way of describing her perceptions which is of course traceable to the
“Divine darkness” of Dionysius the Areopagite. Finally she beheld it,
“as clearly as is possible in this life.” All these visions seem to have
come to her when she was in a state of ecstasy or trance. She speaks of
being “exalted in spirit,” “rapt to the first elevation”; lifted to
wholly new levels of consciousness. She describes them as well as she
can, yet plainly she is only able to tell us a fraction of her
experience. Over and over again she declares the hopeless inadequacy of
human speech, the impossibility of “speaking as she saw.” Her state is
like that of Dante at the end of the _Paradiso_, save that her wings
were fitted for these flights.

“I beheld the ineffable fullness of God; but I can relate nothing of it,
save that I have _seen_ the fullness of Divine Wisdom, wherein is all
goodness.” Again, “inasmuch as this was a supernatural thing, I cannot
express it in words.” “Many other things were clearly set forth to me;
but I neither can nor will relate them.” “All that I say of this, seems
to me to be nothing. I feel as though I offended in speaking of it, for
so greatly does the Good exceed all my words that my speech seems to be
but blasphemy.”

Those things, however, which she does contrive to relate, have an
astonishing suggestive quality, a great philosophic sweep, combined with
an intimate appeal to our own deepest intuitions, which place them, so
far as mystical history is concerned, on a level with some of the
greatest passages in Jacopone da Todi and in Ruysbroeck; and in my
opinion far beyond the more celebrated intellectual visions of St.
Teresa.

Thus she says, “the eyes of my soul were opened and I beheld the
plenitude of God, by which I understood the whole world both here and
beyond the sea, the abyss, and all other things. And in this I beheld
nothing save the Divine Power, in a way that is utterly indescribable,
so that through the greatness of its wonder the soul cried with a loud
voice, saying, ‘The whole world is full of God.’ Wherefore I understood
that the world is but a little thing; and I saw that the power of God
was above all things, and the whole world was filled with it.”

Here we are reminded of Julian of Norwich—“He showed me a little thing,
the quantity of an hazel nut. I looked thereon with the eye of my
understanding and thought; What may this be? and it was answered
generally thus: It is all that is made.”

“After I had seen the power of God, His will and His justice,” says
Angela, again, “I was lifted higher still; and then I no longer beheld
the power and will as before. But I beheld a _Thing_, as fixed and
stable as it was indescribable; and more than this I cannot say, save
that I have often said already, namely, that it was all good. And
although my soul beheld not love, yet when it saw that indescribable
_Thing_, it was itself filled with indescribable joy, so that it was
taken out of the state it was in before, and placed in this great and
ineffable state. I know not whether I was then in the body or out of the
body. It is enough to say that all the other visions seemed to me less
great than this.”

Again, “One time in Lent ... the eyes of my soul were opened, and I saw
Love advancing gently towards me, and I saw the beginning but not the
end. There seemed to me only a continuation and an eternity thereof, so
that I cannot tell its likeness nor colour; but directly this Love
reached me I beheld all these things more clearly with the eyes of the
soul than I could do with the eyes of the body. This Love came towards
me after the manner of a sickle. Not that there was any actual and
measurable likeness; but when first it appeared to me it did not give
itself to me in such abundance as I expected, but a part was withdrawn.
Therefore I say, after the manner of a sickle. Then I was filled with
love and a great satisfaction, but although it satisfied me, it
generated within me so great a hunger that all my members were loosened;
and my soul fainted with longing to attain to the All.”

I give one more, particularly interesting to English students because of
its parallels with our own great mystical work, _The Cloud of
Unknowing_: “There was a time when my soul was exalted to behold God
with so much clearness that never before had I beheld Him so distinctly.
But I did not here see Love so fully; rather I lost that which I had
before, and was left without love. Afterwards I saw Him darkly, and this
darkness was the greatest blessing that could be imagined, and thought
can conceive nothing equal to this.... Here likewise I see all Good....
The soul delights unspeakably therein, yet it beholds nothing that can
be spoken by the tongue or conceived by the heart. It sees nothing yet
sees all, because it beholds the Good darkly; and the more darkly and
secretly the Good is seen, the more certain it is, and excellent above
all things. Wherefore all other good that can be seen or imagined is
doubtless less than this, and even when the soul sees the Divine wisdom,
power and will of God (which I have seen marvellously at other times),
it is all less than this most certain Good. Because this is the whole,
and those other things are but part of the whole.... But seen thus
darkly, the Good brings no smile to the lips, no fervour of love to the
heart; for the body does not tremble or become moved and distressed as
at other times; because the soul sees, and not the body, which rests and
sleeps, and the tongue is dumb and speechless. All the many ineffable
kindnesses which God has shown me, all the sweet words and divine
sayings and doings, are so much less than this that I saw in the
darkness, that I put no hope in them.... But to this most high power of
beholding God ineffably through great darkness, my spirit was uplifted
three times only and no more.”

“This cloud,” says _The Cloud of Unknowing_, of that same Divine Dark,
“is evermore between thee and thy God ... therefore shape thyself to
abide in this darkness so long as thou mayest, evermore crying after Him
whom thou lovest, for if ever thou shalt feel Him or see Him (in such
sort as He may be seen or felt in this life) it behoveth always to be in
this cloud or darkness.” So Angela: “When I behold and am in that Good,
although I seem to see nothing yet I see all things.” In this
achievement she reaches the goal of the mystic experience, the ecstatic
communion with the Absolute One.

I have called her a Franciscan mystic. If by Franciscan mysticism we
mean that exquisite sense of the Divine immanence in nature, that poetic
temperament, that peculiar and elusive charm, which we associate with
St. Francis himself; then, perhaps, there seems little that is
characteristically Franciscan in Angela. But if, looking past the
special character of the Founder, we try to seize the essence of that
secret he was seeking to impart, then, allowing for the inevitable
development which any idea undergoes when it enters the world of change,
we may regard her as a typical Franciscan of the second generation. She
was indeed conditioned at all points by the Franciscan environment in
which her religious life developed; that ardent society of “Spirituals,”
mostly recruited from the devout laity, which sprang up in her time in
the Italian cities. This society, with its advanced contemplative
tradition, its demand for a close imitation of Christ, was a
forcing-house of the mystical life. Angela shows her close connection
with it in the character of her penitence, in her passionate devotion to
the Cross and Passion, and also in the metaphysical quality of her
greatest mystical apprehensions. These three outstanding
characteristics, corresponding in a general sense to the three great
phases of the mystical life, are again seen in the poetry in which her
contemporary Jacopone discloses to us the stages of anguished contrition
and of uncontrolled fervour through which he moved to the heights of
union with God. These two great converts and initiates of love
illuminate and explain one another: for in them we see an identical
tradition of the spiritual life interpreted by different temperaments.
For each the Way is an education in love, and Jacopone speaks for both
of them when he says of it:

                     “Distinguese l’amore en terzo stato:
                   bono, meglio, sommo, sublimato;
                   lo sommo sí vole essere amato
                   senza compagnia.”


                                  III
                           JULIAN OF NORWICH.


All that we know directly of Julian of Norwich—the most attractive, if
not the greatest of the English mystics—comes to us from her book, _The
Revelations of Divine Love_, in which she has set down her spiritual
experiences and meditations. Like her contemporaries, Walter Hilton and
the author of _The Cloud of Unknowing_, she lives only in her vision and
her thought. Her external circumstances are almost unknown to us, but
some of these can be recovered, or at least deduced, from the study of
contemporary history and art; a source of information too often
neglected by those who specialize in religious literature, yet without
which that literature can never wholly be understood.

Julian, who was born about 1342, in the reign of Edward III, grew up
among the surroundings and influences natural to a deeply religious East
Anglian gentlewoman at the close of the Middle Ages. Though she speaks
of herself as “unlettered,” which perhaps means unable to write, she
certainly received considerable education, including some Latin, before
her _Revelations_ were composed. Her known connection with the
Benedictine convent of Carrow, near Norwich, in whose gift was the
anchorage to which she retired, suggests that she may have been educated
by the nuns; and perhaps made her first religious profession at this
house, which was in her time the principal “young ladies’ school” of the
Norwich diocese, and a favourite retreat of those adopting the religious
life. During her most impressionable years she must have seen in their
freshness some of the greatest creations of Gothic art, for in Norfolk
both architecture and painting had been carried to the highest pitch of
excellence by the beginning of the fourteenth century. The great East
Anglian school of miniature painting had already produced its
masterpieces and was in its decadence. But if we look at these
masterpieces—the wonderful manuscripts illuminated at Gorleston near
Yarmouth, and other religious houses of the district—and remember that
these are merely the surviving examples of an art which decorated the
walls of the churches as richly as the pages of its service-books, we
begin to realize the sort of iconography, the view of the Christian
landscape, from which Julian’s mental furniture was derived. Some of the
best of these manuscripts are in the British Museum; and those who wish
to understand the atmosphere in which the mediæval mystics flourished
would do well to study Julian’s _Revelations_ in their light. There they
will find expressed in design that mixture of gaiety and awe, that
balanced understanding of the natural and the divine, which is one of
her strong characteristics. She, like these artists, can afford to
wreathe her images of supernatural mysteries in homely details drawn
from the common life. Moreover, the more pictorial her revelations
become, the more closely they approximate to the pictures in the
psalters and Books of Hours of her time. From this source came her
detailed visions of incidents in the Passion—the blood that she saw
running down under the garland of thorns, the dried, discoloured body,
the gaping wounds, and “rueful and wasted” face of Christ—and those of
the Blessed Virgin as a “little maiden,” as “Mater Dolorosa,” and as the
crowned Queen of Heaven. All these were common subjects with the
miniature artists and wall painters of the time, and the form which they
took in Julian’s revelations must be attributed to a large extent to
unconscious memory of those artists’ works.

Another more inward aspect of contemporary religion has also affected
her: the cult of the Holy Name of Jesus. This beautiful devotion was
specially characteristic of English personal religion in the late Middle
Ages, and is strongly marked in the writings of the mystics; especially
Hilton and Rolle. The great popularity in England of the hymn _Jesu
Dulcis Memoria_, and the many vernacular imitations of it current in
Julian’s day, helped in the spread of this cult; with which was
associated that intense and highly emotional preoccupation with the
physical accidents of the Passion so constantly reflected in her
visionary experience. “O good Jesu!” cried Rolle, “my heart thou hast
bound in love of Thy Name and now I cannot but sing it”; and he spoke
not for himself only but for all the best religious lyrists of the early
fourteenth century, whose characteristic mood was that of personal,
intimate, and sorrowing love of Jesus.

                      “Sweet Jesu, now will I sing
                      To thee, a song of love longing.
                      Teach me, Lord, thy love song
                      With sweet tears ever among.”

Thus, one of these Middle English poets could write:

                  “Jesu, well owe I to love thee
                  For that me showed the roodë tree,
                  The crown of thorns, the nailës three,
                  The sharp spear that through-stong thee,
                  Jesu of love is sooth tokening
                  Thy head down-bowed to love-kissing,
                  Thine arms spread to love-clipping,
                  Thy side all open to love-showing.”

Of such poetry as this—with which she was probably familiar—Julian often
reminds us; and sometimes her parallels with it are close. Thus she says
in her tenth Revelation: “Then with a glad cheer our Lord looked into
his side, and beheld rejoicing. With his sweet looking he led forth the
understanding of his creature by the same wound into his side within.
And then he showed a fair delectable place and large enough for all
mankind that shall be saved to rest in peace and in love.... And with
this our good Lord said full blissfully: Lo! how that I loved thee.” In
such passages as this, in her highly visualized meditations on the Crown
of Thorns and the Precious Blood, and in such phrases as “I liked none
other heaven than Jesus, who shall be my bliss when I am there,” and
other ardent expressions of religious love, she is speaking the common
devotional language and using the common devotional imagery of her own
day. Hence those merely visionary experiences with which her book opens
and which form by far the least important part of it, can be accounted
for as the result of unconscious memory, weaving new vivid pictures from
the current religious and artistic conceptions in which she had been
reared. A correspondence has indeed been detected between the order of
these fifteen “showings,” and the fifteen prayers on the Passion known
as the “XV Os,” which occur in the _Sarum Horæ_. They are, in fact,
dreams of which any devout and imaginative person of that time was
capable; and need not be taken too seriously when estimating the
character of Julian’s mysticism.

This, then, was the religious, artistic, and emotional environment in
which she grew up; an environment to which new sombre colour and new
realization of pain had been given by the Black Death which swept
through Norfolk when she was a child. More important, however, than any
external influence, was the part her own temperament played in her
special apprehension of God. It is plain that she was from the first of
an intensely religious, meditative disposition. As a girl, she says, she
asked of God three things. The first was, that she might have a keen
realization of Christ’s Passion; because although she had great feeling
of it, she desired more, and specially a bodily sight of His pains. The
second was bodily sickness, much esteemed in the Middle Ages as a means
of grace; and this she wished to suffer at thirty years of age. The
third was, that as Saint Cecilia was pierced by three wounds, so she
might be pierced with the three wounds of contrition, compassion, and
eager longing towards God. The first two desires she forgot for a while;
but the three wounds she prayed for continually. When she was thirty
years old, the gift of sickness was granted her, and it was exactly such
a sickness, “so hard as unto death,” as she had asked: a fact which
tells us a good deal about Julian’s mental make-up, revealing her as the
possessor of an extremely active “psychic background.” By the law of
association we may be sure that her illness brought back to mind the
other forgotten prayer, for a deeper insight into, and vision of, the
Passion. It is supposed that she was at this time already an anchoress,
shut in that tiny room against the south wall of St. Julian’s church at
Norwich, of which the foundations can still be traced. But nothing in
her own account suggests this, and the presence of her mother and “other
persons” round her sick bed is rather against it. At the same time, a
single woman of strong religious bent is hardly likely in that period to
have remained in the world till she was thirty. Julian was perhaps a
Benedictine nun at Carrow, and after her vision sought a life of greater
seclusion and austerity at St. Julian’s, which was the property of the
Carrow convent. The anchoress was often, but not always, a professed
nun: and though no reminiscences of cloister life can be traced in
Julian’s writings, such a life would account in part for the theological
knowledge and familiarity with dogmatic language which those writings
display.

Julian’s account of what happened in her illness is extremely precise,
and makes this part of her revelation an interesting psychological
document. She fell ill early in May 1373; and on the fourth night was
thought to be dying and given the last sacraments. For two days more she
lingered, quite conscious and expecting death; and early in the morning
of the third day, lost all feeling in her lower limbs. When the priest
came to help her agony she was already speechless; but made her nurses
prop her upright in bed, so that she could fix her failing eyes on the
crucifix he held towards her. This she could see, though everything else
grew dim to her sight. Then her head fell on one side, breath failed,
and she was sure that the end had come.

With this conviction and acceptance of death, the stress of the
involuntary struggle for life seems suddenly to have ended. She had
passed into a new state of consciousness, in which her mind was clear
and her body free of pain, “as whole as ever before or after.” In this
condition her old and forgotten desires came back into her mind. The
first, for sickness, had been granted. Now, she was impelled to ask the
other, for a keener realization of the Passion; and this buried wish,
surging back abruptly into consciousness, became the starting-point of
her mystical experiences. We cannot deny that these experiences had
their pathological side. Her physical and psychic state were abnormal.
With the perfect candour and common sense which add so much to our
delight in her, she confesses that she at first mistook her revelations
for delirium, and said to the monk who afterwards visited her that she
had raved. There are, however, in these revelations, as in all visionary
experience of any value, two distinct sides. One is the visual or
auditory hallucination—the vision seen, the voice heard—the materials
for which clearly come from the unconscious mind of the visionary, and
can generally be traced to their source. The other is the intuitive
spiritual teaching that accompanies it, and often far exceeds the
visionary’s own knowledge or power. Julian, in her account of what
happened to her, keeps these two elements perfectly distinct. “All the
blessed teaching of our Lord God,” she says, “was shown to me by three
parts—that is to say, by the bodily sight, by words formed in mine
understanding, and by ghostly sight.”

The bodily vision, as she expressly affirms, she did not ask for; and
here she agrees with all true mystics, who invariably distrust these
quasi-physical experiences. Yet it was in such visionary hallucination
that her revelations began. With her eyes still fixed on the crucifix,
and apparently at the point of death, she suddenly saw red blood running
down from the Crown of Thorns, as if in answer to her prayer for more
feeling of the Passion of Christ. The Cross had become for her, as the
shining pewter dish did for Jacob Boehme, or the running stream for St.
Ignatius, a focal point on which to concentrate; and so a door to a
deeper state of consciousness. Spiritual insight went side by side with
the bodily vision, which was accepted without question by Julian as a
direct message from Christ to strengthen her, “lest she be tempted of
fiends before she died”; for in spite of her intuitive philosophic
sense, we must remember that she lived in imagination in that Gothic
world of concrete devils and angels which the cathedral sculptors
reproduced. The double experience—outward pictures of the Passion, and
inward teachings of the nature of God—continued for five hours, whilst
she lay in a state of trance which her mother mistook for death. “The
first began early in the morn, about the hour of four; and they lasted,
showing by process full fair and steadily, each following other, till it
was nine of the day overpassed.” In those five hours Julian received the
whole substance of her teaching, afterwards divided by her into sixteen
“revelations of love.” When they had passed, normal consciousness
returned, or, as she says, she “fell to herself,” and knew that she must
live. She lay for some time in weakness and depression, tormented by
evil dreams; but she recovered from her sickness, and lived to a great
age. Her careful account of that illness, and of the psychic experiences
accompanying it, helps us to understand those experiences from the
psychological as well as the mystical point of view. Seen thus, they are
not unique; but classic examples of a type which turns up from time to
time in medical history. Thus Dr. Edwin Ash, in _Faith and Suggestion_,
has described a case which strikingly resembles that of Julian. Here,
too, at the crisis of an apparently hopeless illness, the patient fell
into a death-like trance, had visions of a religious type, and emerged
cured. Her mind was far inferior to that of Julian, hence her experience
had less beauty and significance and was of little value for other
souls. Nevertheless, its general outline forces us to acknowledge that
it belongs to the same class, and helps us to interpret the facts which
lie behind Julian’s words.

Julian’s revelations have come down to us in two distinct versions,
which have both been edited for modern readers. The best known is the
long version, reproduced in Miss Warrack’s delightful edition: but our
earliest manuscript of this only goes back to the sixteenth century, at
least a hundred years after Julian’s death. Another, much shorter, is
found in one fifteenth-century manuscript in the British Museum, and
this has been edited by Mr. Dundas Herford, who claims—I think with good
reason—that it represents Julian’s first account of her visions, written
or told while they were still fresh in her mind, and before her memory
of them had been coloured by long meditation, or by the theological
learning which she certainly acquired in later life. It briefly sets
forth her chain of visions, and the “ghostly words” and inward teachings
that accompanied them. These, she says, she has set down for the help of
her fellow-Christians and because she saw it to be God’s will. “But,”
she adds, “God forbid that ye should say or take it so, that I am a
teacher: for I mean not so! No! I never meant so! For I am a woman,
unlearned, feeble and frail; but I know well that this that I say, I
have it of the showing of Him that is Sovereign Teacher.” In the long
version these deprecatory words are omitted. Julian no longer fears to
be regarded as a teacher. On the contrary, she speaks with a gentle
authority as one whose position is assured. She is now, without doubt,
the established anchoress; the devout woman whose special vocation is
known, and to whom people come for spiritual teaching. Moreover, she
tells us in this book that only twenty years, less three months, after
her vision was she inwardly taught the importance of all its details,
however “misty and indifferent” they seemed. She was therefore past
fifty when she wrote or dictated it; and it contains the fruit, not only
of her first vivid experience, but of all the ponderings by which the
last atom of significance was extracted from it, the “enlightenings and
touchings of the same Spirit,” which kept the revelation fresh in after
life.

As she says herself—for her introspective powers were remarkable—the
“first beginnings” and subsequent “ghostly teachings” at last became so
merged in her understanding that she could not separate them. There is a
parallel to this in the life of Boehme. He says that in the abnormal
state which was induced by gazing at the polished pewter dish he
“understood the Being of all Beings”—even as Julian “saw God in a
Point”—but this stupendous revelation only left him dazed and
inarticulate. Only after twelve years of meditation, during which he
felt the seed of truth “unfolding within him like a young plant,” was he
able to describe it.

When we compare the two versions of Julian’s work, we find many
differences which remind us of this confession. Although the whole
doctrine of the long book is really implied in the short book—for it is,
in Boehme’s phrase, an unfolding of the plant from that one seed—we see
that the most beautiful and poetical passages are found in the long
version only. They are the fruit of meditation upon vision. The workings
of Julian’s unconscious mind in her trance have only provided the raw
material, as the inspiration of the poet gives only the crude beginnings
of the poem. Moreover, with age her character deepened and grew richer.
She used her talent to help other souls, and it increased. She studied,
too, and found language of great subtlety and beauty in which to express
her vision of truth. Though even the first version of her book shows
theological knowledge which would put to shame most present-day
Christians, in the later work this knowledge is much increased. Reading
was part of the duty of an anchoress, being regarded as an essential
element in the life of prayer; and intelligent reading has clearly
nourished Julian’s deep meditations on the character of God. In her
there was an almost perfect balance between the intellectual and the
emotional life, and there are few women mystics of Whom we can say this.

The question of her literary sources is an interesting one. A careful
examination of her revelations makes it plain that even when the short
version was written, she was already acquainted with many theological
conceptions; whilst the meditations with which the long version is
enriched, and its fuller descriptions of her spiritual “Showings,”
reveal her as possessing at least by middle life a considerable
knowledge of the language of Augustinian theology and of the root-ideas
of Christian mysticism. As used by her, many of these ideas have the
special colour which was given to them by Meister Eckhart and his
school; and suggest that Julian at one time or another had come into
contact with the characteristically Dominican type of mysticism which is
best known to us in the works of Suso and Tauler. In her teaching on
sin—“I saw not sin, for I believe it hath no substance nor any part of
being”—she is following, indeed almost quoting, Eckhart’s saying that
“evil is nothing but a privation of being; not an effect, but a defect.”
So, too, Eckhart’s daring assertion that sin has its place in the
scheme—“Since God, in a way, also wills that I should have committed
sins, I do not wish not to have committed them”—appears to be echoed in
gentler form in Julian’s view of sin as a purifying scourge, and of the
scars which it leaves on the redeemed soul as being “not wounds but
worships.” Her beautiful saying that we are God’s bliss, “for in us He
enjoyeth without end,” seems like a deduction from the Eckhartian
paradox, “God needs me as much as I need Him.” She has received, perhaps
from the same source, the antique mystical notion of the soul’s
precession from and return to God. “The soul,” said Eckhart, “is created
that it may flow back into the bottom of the bottomless fountain whence
it came forth.” “Thus I understood,” says Julian, “that all His blessed
children which be come out of Him by nature shall be brought again into
Him by grace”; and again, “all kinds that He hath made to flow out of
Him to work His will shall be restored and brought again into Him.”
Here, again, the naked Eckhartian monism seems to be transmitted through
a more human and more spiritual temperament. She agrees, too, with the
German mystics in her doctrine of God as the “ground of the soul.” “Our
soul is so deep-grounded in God and so endlessly treasured that we may
not come to the knowing thereof till we have first knowing of God....
God is nearer to us than our own soul, for He is the ground in whom our
soul standeth, and He is the mean that keepeth the substance and the
sensuality together so that they shall never depart.” So Tauler says, “A
man who verily desires to enter in will surely find God here, for God
never separates Himself from this ground. God will be present with him
and he will find and enjoy eternity here.”

Julian’s revelation was received in 1373, and the long text as we have
it was written at some date after 1393. Eckhart had died in 1329, Tauler
in 1361; and the great Ruysbroeck, whose mysticism owes much on its
speculative side to Eckhart’s philosophy, in 1381. The influence of
their teaching spread rapidly, and few preaching friars of an inward
disposition can have escaped it. To these preaching friars was committed
in the fourteenth century the special duty of giving solid theological
teaching to nuns. This was commonly done by way of vernacular sermons
and instructions, of which Tauler’s surviving sermons are types: and it
was possibly through such instructions given in the Carrow convent that
Julian obtained that peculiar knowledge of Dominican mysticism, those
contacts with Augustinian and Victorine thought, on which the more
philosophic side of her revelation seems to depend. The parallels with
her great contemporary St. Catherine of Siena, which Professor Edmund
Gardner has noted, are probably due to the fact that both women drew
their ideas from some earlier source. Her likenesses to Ruysbroeck can
also be accounted for. His _Seven Cloisters_, _Kingdom of God’s Lovers_,
and _Ornaments of the Spiritual Marriage_ were all completed before
1350, and knowledge of them would reach East Anglia quickly, through the
Flemish colony established at Norwich. Several close correspondences
with him can be traced in Julian’s work; especially her conception of
God’s eternal thirst and love-longing, so similar to Ruysbroeck’s
“hungry yet generous love of God,” and the opening phrase of her Third
Revelation, “After this I saw God in a Point,” which reminds us of the
great definition in the _Seven Cloisters_, “That Point in which all our
lives find their end.” Julian thus represents the first emergence in
English literature of a stream of tradition which is not represented in
the classic school of English mysticism descended from Rolle. By this
school she does not appear to have been greatly influenced; there is
little in her that reminds us of it, or of that group of contemplatives
who produced the _Cloud of Unknowing_ and its companion works. Her true
affinities are with the Christian Platonism which St. Augustine
introduced into theology, and its developments in the works of Erigena
and Eckhart. But when we have given full weight to the effects upon her
work of oral teaching and of reading, the true originality of that work
only becomes more manifest. Reading and teaching fed her speculative
mind, and helped her to understand and express her own experience; but
this experience in its essence was independent of intellectual
knowledge. It was the fruit of a deeply mystical and poetic nature,
brooding on the conception of God common to mediæval Christianity.
Julian had in a high degree constructive religious genius; and for such
a nature an evocative phrase is enough to waken the “ghostly sight.”

It is impossible in a short essay to give any full account of her
teaching. That teaching is centred on her own ardent consciousness of
God, as an all-transcending yet all-enclosing reality; a conception at
once philosophic and practical. For Julian, as for the Platonists, God
is the sum of the highest spiritual values—“He is all-thing that is good
to my seeming, and all-thing that is good, it is He.” Her perception of
the Divine Immanence is peculiarly intense, and expressed in the
strongest terms. “God is kind (nature) in His being: that is to say,
that goodness that is in kind, that is God. He is the ground, He is the
substance, He is the same thing that is kind-head,” and again, “I saw
full assuredly that our substance is in God, and also I saw that in our
sensuality God is ... for it is His good pleasure to reign in our
understanding blissfully, and sit in our soul restfully, and to dwell in
our soul endlessly, us all working into Him.” But this vivid sense of
Divine reality, as the very ground of being, is closely bound up with
her devotion to the person of Christ. Her theological path, like her
mystical experience, lay through the human to the Divine, through
emotional realization of the Passion to intellectual vision of the
Godhead. In the first revelation of all we get these two aspects of
truth sharply contrasted; for there her vision of the bloodstained Crown
of Thorns, with its intimate appeal to the heart, is balanced by her
other interior sight of “the Godhead seen in mine understanding.” The
long version of her book elaborates this simple intuition of the Deity
into a very beautiful description of the Holy Trinity—always one of
Julian’s favourite subjects—but the whole is really implied in the first
brief statement, which strikes at once her characteristic chord of
intimacy and awe, or, as she puts it, “the dread and the homeliness of
God.” In the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, which was never far from
her thoughts, she found the link between these personal and impersonal
apprehensions. That half-Platonic notion of Christ the Eternal Wisdom as
“Mother” of the soul, which is one of her most original conceptions,
here takes its place side by side with the other, more metaphysical
intuition of that unconditioned Deity in whom “All-thing hath the
Being.” “For all our life is in three: in the first we have our being,
in the second we have our increasing, and in the third we have our
fulfilling: the first is nature, the second is mercy, and the third is
grace. For the first I understood that the high might of the Trinity is
our Father, and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother, and the
great love of the Trinity is our Lord: and all this we have in nature
and in our substantial making.... All the fair working, and all the
sweet kindly office of dearworthy motherhood is impropriated to the
Second Person ... and all is one Love.”

This blend of personal and metaphysical vision is not unique. We find it
again in the Franciscan contemplative, Angela of Foligno. But Julian’s
nature is richer and more mellow, and the doctrine of love which she
deduced from her experience is more profound. Here, in this harmonized
consciousness of the most human and most philosophic aspects of
religious experience, she is typical of Christian mysticism at its best.
She avoids on the one hand the excessive intellectualism of the
Neoplatonist, and on the other the unpleasant exuberance of the
religious emotionalist, yet draws from the apprehensions of both the
heart and the head all the elements needed to feed a full spiritual
life. The human element brought in by Christianity, with all the
emotional values belonging to it—however symbolic this side of
contemplation must necessarily be—redeems philosophic mysticism from the
clear coldness, the lofty superiority, that St. Augustine condemned in
the Platonists. But, equally, it is the philosophic background, the
austere worship of that trinity of Light, Life, and Love, in whom, as
Julian says, we are clad more closely than a body in its clothes, which
saves mystical fervour from its worst extravagances. Here she is and
will ever be one of the safest guides to the contemplative life.

Another special quality of Julian’s teaching is its healthy, vigorous,
affirmative character. The only two sins she sternly condemns—and she
calls them not sins, but sickness—are sloth or lack of zest, and
doubtful dread or lack of hope. Zest and hope she regards as essential
factors in the life of the soul. The Light, Life, and Love which form
her ultimate definition of triune Reality—the Mother, Brother, and
Saviour, which are her nearest images for Christ’s relation with
man—these are conceptions which kill the sort of pious moods that R. L.
Stevenson called “dim, dem, and dowie.” God’s attitude to man is
“courteous, glad, and merry,” and we do Him less honour by solemnity
than by “cheer of mirth and joy.” To her, only the good is the true, and
evil is a void, a lack of the only reality; a Platonic notion which has
always been dear to the mystics. “In this naked word Sin,” says Julian,
“our Lord brought to my mind generally all that is not good ... but I
saw not sin, for I believe it hath no manner of substance nor no part of
being, nor could it be known but by the pain it is cause of.” It follows
that our attention should not be given to the avoidance or consideration
of sin, but to the understanding and enjoyment of the good and the real.
“The beholding of other men’s sins, it maketh as it were a thick mist
before the eyes of the soul,” says Julian. Her strongest condemnation is
given to morbid pondering of past sins and mistakes. “Right as by the
courtesy of God He forgets our sins when we repent, right so will He
that we forget our sin, and all our heaviness and all our doubtful
dreads.” This world, after all, is only a nursery for heaven, and its
inhabitants mostly spiritual babies who need not be taken too seriously.
“I understood no higher stature in this life than childhood;” and the
attitude of God to our infant souls is that of “the kindly loving Mother
that witteth and knoweth the need of her child and keepeth it full
tenderly as the kind and condition of Motherhood will.”

No modern psychologist could be more emphatic than this
fourteenth-century recluse on the foolishness of worry, the duty of
confidence, gaiety, and hope. “Notwithstanding our simple living and our
blindness here, yet endlessly our courteous Lord beholdeth us in this
working rejoicing; and of all things we may please him best, wisely and
truly to believe, and to enjoy with Him and in Him.” She brings back the
primitive Christian insistence on joy—confident happiness—as the one
sure sign of the spiritual life. If we have not got this, it is because
we lack the faith and common sense which sees life in a universal and
disinterested light. Once, Julian says, she was inclined to worry about
God’s work in the soul of a friend whom she loved, and she was answered
in her reason “as it were by a friendly man,” “Take it generally! and
behold the courtesy of thy Lord God as He shows it to thee, for it is
more worship to God to behold Him in all than in any special thing.” In
those words we have a complete prescription for happiness and inward
peace. All that is made, as Julian saw in her vision, is but “a little
thing the quantity of an hazel nut” in comparison with the Divine life
that creates, keeps, and loves it, and may be known in those sudden
glimpses of perfection which we call the Good, the Beautiful, and the
True. These, in her language, are “God’s courteous showings of Himself,”
and we are most likely to encounter them when we take the worlds of
nature and grace “generally,” and refrain from partial or egoistic
criticisms and demands. Failure in this simple rule, she thinks, is the
true cause of human misery and unrest. “This is the cause why we be not
all in ease of heart and soul; that we seek here rest in those things
that are so little, wherein is no rest, and know not our God that is
All-mighty, All-wise, and All-good.”




                       MYSTICISM IN MODERN FRANCE


                                   I
                     SŒUR THÉRÈSE DE L’ENFANT-JÉSUS


That Christian tradition of the spiritual life which has been specially
developed within the religious orders—with its definite objective, its
methodical training in self-conquest and the art of prayer—is often
regarded as a mere survival of mediævalism, lingering in odd corners but
having no points of contact with our modern world. Yet this tradition
lives now, as surely as in the days of St. Gertrude or St. Teresa. It
continues to exercise its mysterious attraction; transmuting those who
give themselves to its influence, and producing that special type of
character and experience which is so clearly marked in the histories of
the Catholic saints. In a world of change, this has hardly altered.
Within the contemplative convents there obtains that same scale of
values, that same contempt for the body and undivided attention to the
interests of the soul, that same avoidance of all comfort or pleasure
and eager acceptance of pain, which is revealed in the standard writings
of Christian asceticism. In these houses, mysticism is still a practical
art: the education there given represents the classic spiritual
discipline of the west, and still retains its transforming power.
Through it, souls obtain access to a veritable world of spirit; and
apprehend under symbols eternal values, which are unperceived by their
fellow men. By it they are supported through the difficult adjustments
of consciousness and sublimation of instinct, which are needed when the
centre of life’s interest is shifted from physical to supernal levels.
This is a fact which students of psychology, and especially of religious
experience in its intensive form, should not ignore. They need not go to
the Middle Ages for their examples of the effect of ascetic training and
contemplative practice, or for characteristic specimens of the “saintly
type”; for these may be found within our own period, and studied in
their relation to our modern world.

Those who regard this saintly type as a hot-house plant, raised under
conditions which appear to defend it from the temptations and
distractions of ordinary existence, can have little acquaintance either
with cloister ideals or with cloistered lives. A thoroughgoing monastic
discipline is the most searching school of virtue ever invented. It
withers easy-going piety and “other-worldliness” at the root. It confers
a robust humility which is proof against all mortifications and
disappointments. It leaves no room for individual tastes and
preferences, religious or secular. Its pupils must learn to resent
nothing, to demand nothing; to thrive on humiliations, to love and serve
all without distinction, without personal choice; even to renounce the
special consolations of religion. The common idea of the cloister, as
providing a career of impressive religious ceremonial varied by plain
sewing, pious gossip, and “devotionettes” is far from the truth. On its
external side, a well-ordered convent provides a busy, practical, family
life of the most austere kind, with many duties, both religious and
domestic, countless demands upon patience, good-temper and
unselfishness, and few relaxations. On its hidden side, it is a device
to train and toughen the spirit, develop its highest powers, and help it
to concentrate its attention more and more completely on eternal
realities. That training is still given in its completeness; and the
classic, saintly character is still being produced, with its special
cultivation of love, meekness, and self-sacrifice, balanced by energy,
courage, and strength of will.

Sanctity is the orientation of the spirit towards supreme Reality. To
the believer in any theistic religion, no attitude of the soul could be
simpler, more natural than this. There is nothing about it which
deserves to be called abnormal, archaic, or fantastic. The complications
with which it is surrounded, the unnatural aspect which it wears for
practical men, all come from its collision with the entangled interests
and perverse ideals of the world. Thus, retreat from this tangle of sham
interests, the building up of a consistent universe within which the
self can develop its highest powers and purest loves, is felt to be
imperative for those selves in whom this innate aptitude for God reaches
the conscious level. In these spirits, the “vocation” for the special
life of correspondence with the supersensual reproduces on a higher
plane the vocation of the artist or the poet. All the self’s best
energies and desires tend in this direction, and it will achieve
harmonious development only by unifying itself about this centre of
interest, and submitting to the nurture and discipline which shall
assure its dominance. The symbols with which the universe of religion is
furnished, the moral law which there obtains, are all contributory to
the one end; and find their justification in its achievement.

Within the Christian Church, and especially in that which is technically
called the “religious life,” these symbols and this law have not varied
for many centuries; nor has the type of personality which they develop
changed much since it first appeared in monastic history. The sharp
sense of close communion with, and immediate responsibility to, a
personal God possessing human attributes; the complete abandonment of
desire, combined with astonishing tenacity of purpose; contempt for the
merely comfortable either in spiritual or physical affairs; a glad and
eager acceptance of pain—these are the qualities of the Christian saint,
and these are still fostered in appropriate subjects by the cloistered
life. These facts have been abundantly demonstrated during the last
thirty years in a group of French Carmelite mystics, of whom the best
known is Thérèse Martin, already the object of a widespread _cultus_
under the name of Sœur Thérése de l’Enfant Jésus. Others who will repay
study are Elizabeth Catez, or Sœur Elizabeth de la Trinité (1880-1906)
and Mère Marie-Ange de l’Enfant-Jésus (1881-1909). It is clear that we
have in these young women—for they all died before they were thirty
years of age—a genuine renaissance of traditional Catholic mysticism.
Their experience exhibits many close correspondences with that of the
great mystics of the past; the same development of the interior life can
be traced in them, and they knew at first hand some at least among those
forms of spiritual consciousness which are described by Ruysbroeck,
Angela of Foligno, St. Teresa, and St. John of the Cross.

The first in time and in importance—for the others depended to a greater
or less degree on her influence and example—was Thérèse Martin, who was
born at Alençon in 1873 and died in 1897. The last nine years of her
life were spent in the Carmelite Convent of Lisieux in Normandy; and she
there wrote the spiritual autobiography, _L’histoire d’une âme_, which
has since been translated into every European language. In her
life—which shows with exceptional clearness the reality and driving
power of that instinct which is known as religious vocation—and in the
incidents connected with her death and _cultus_, we find many suggestive
parallels with the histories of the historical saints. These parallels
often help us to determine the true meaning of statements in those
histories; indicating the possible origin of much that now appears
extravagant and abnormal, and restoring to their real position in the
human race men and women who dropped their living characteristics in
ascending to the altars of the Church.

We notice first in Thérèse the extent to which heredity and environment
contributed to the formation in her of an exclusively religious
temperament. She inherited from both parents an ascetic tendency. Her
father, as a young man, had sought without success to become a novice at
the Great St. Bernard; her mother had wished to be a Sister of Charity.
Their marriage had the character of a religious dedication; and their
one wish was for children who might be consecrated to the service of
God. Nine were born, of whom four died in infancy. The five girls who
survived all entered the cloister, for which indeed their whole life had
been a perfect preparation. The idea of marriage seems never to have
occurred to any member of the family. Hence Thérèse, the youngest child,
grew up in a home which was a veritable forcing-house of the spiritual
life, though full of happiness and warm affection; and by it was moulded
to that puritanism and other-worldliness which is characteristic of real
Catholic piety. There the conception of earthly existence as a “school
for saints” was taken for granted, and the supremacy of religious
interests never questioned: all deeds and words, however trivial, being
judged by the grief or pleasure they would give to God. Even as a tiny
child, she was given a string of beads to count the “sacrifices” made
each day. The Martin family lived, in fact, within a dream-world,
substantially identical with the universe of mediæval piety. It was
peopled with angels and demons, whose activities were constantly noted;
its doors were ever open for the entry of the miraculous, its human
inhabitants were the objects of the Blessed Virgin’s peculiar care,
every chance happening was the result of Divine interference. For them
this universe was actual, not symbolic. Their minds instinctively
rejected every impression that conflicted with it; and its
inconsistencies with the other—perhaps equally symbolic and less
lovely—world of our daily life were unperceived. The most bizarre
legends of the saints were literal facts; all relics were authentic, and
most were full of supernatural power. The Holy House of Loretto, the
face of St. Catherine of Bologna still marked by the kiss of the Infant
Christ, found in them willing and awestruck believers. Yet these crude
symbols, thus literally understood, became for them the means of a real
transcendence. The dominant interests of the home were truly
supersensual; a vigorous spiritual life was fostered in it, marked by
humility and love, true goodness, complete unselfishness, a courageous
attitude towards misfortune and pain.

Thus from birth Thérèse was protected from all risk of intellectual
conflict, and surrounded by harmonious contributory suggestions all
tending to press her emotional life into one mould. Such a nurture could
hardly fail to create either the disposition of a rebel or that of a
saint: but there was in Thérèse no tendency to revolt. Her
temperament—ardent, imaginative, abnormally sensitive, and psychically
unstable—inclined her to the enthusiastic acceptance of religious ideas,
and even in childhood she showed a fervour and devotion exceeding that
of her sisters. When she was still a little girl, the two eldest left
home one after the other, in order to become nuns in the Carmelite
convent of Lisieux. The departure of the first, Pauline, was a crushing
grief to Thérèse, at that time about nine years old; and was apparently
the beginning of her own desire to be a nun. She told the Superior of
the convent that she, too, intended to be a Carmelite, and wished to
take the veil at once. The Reverend Mother, a woman of kindness and good
sense, did not laugh; but advised her to wait until she was sixteen, and
then to try her vocation. There is less absurdity than at first appears
in this childish craving; for the religious type is often strangely
precocious. As the tendency to music or painting may appear in earliest
childhood, so the sense of vocation may awaken, long before the
implications of this mysterious impulse are fully understood. Thus
Elizabeth Catez, afterwards Sœur Elizabeth de la Trinité, determined to
be a nun when she was seven years old, and began at this age to govern
her inner life. She and Thérèse help us to understand the stories and
the visions and self-dedication of the little St. Catherine of Siena; or
those of St. Catherine of Genoa and Madame Guyon, who both wished at
twelve years old to enter a religious order. We are faced in all such
cases by the strange phenomenon of accelerated development: strongly
marked in the case of Thérèse, who undoubtedly had, in spite of the
great simplicity of her nature, a real genius for the spiritual life.

She had, too, and in a marked degree, the peculiarly sensitive psychic
organization which is observed in many of the historic mystics. A long
and severe nervous illness had followed her sister’s departure for the
cloister. It was cured by a form of auto-suggestion for which many
parallels can be found in the history of adult religious experience;
though few in that of children of her age. This incident Thérèse has
described in her memoirs with great clearness and honesty. At a crisis
of the sickness, when she was reduced to utter misery and weakness and
tormented by hallucinations and fears, her three sisters came to her
room and knelt before the statue of the Blessed Virgin, praying for her
cure. The sick child, praying too as well as she could, suddenly saw the
statue take life and advance towards her with a smile. Instantly the
prayer was answered, her pains and delusions left her, and she was
cured. The “vision” being told—and of course accepted at face-value as a
supernatural grace—marked Thérèse from this time as a privileged soul.
It certainly indicated in her an abnormal suggestibility, comparable
with that which is revealed by the somewhat similar incident in the life
of Julian of Norwich, and was not without importance for her future
development.

The religious transformation and exaltation so often experienced in
adolescence is seen in Thérèse in its most intense form. It was
initiated when she was thirteen by another nervous illness,
apparently brought on by a morbid brooding on her own supposed
imperfections—the spiritual ailment well known to religious
directors as “scrupulosity”—and it was from this period that she
afterwards dated the beginning of her real spiritual life. The
childish determination to become a Carmelite had now grown in
strength, and when she was fourteen she broke to her father her own
violent consciousness of vocation; a certitude which nothing could
shake. Her inner life was at this time astonishingly mature. She was
not a prig, but a sensitive and affectionate little girl; yet her
autobiography is full of sayings which surprise us by their depth
and wisdom, when we remember the age of the child who thought and
said them. By the constant practice of small renunciations,
self-denial was now habitual to her; for it was by that which she
called the “little pathway” of incessant but inconspicuous
sacrifices and kind deeds, and not by any abnormal austerities or
devotions, that her character was formed. Though perfectly free from
all spiritual pride, she was, moreover, quite certain of her own
communion with the Divine order, and of the authority of the
impressions which she received from it.

“En ce temps-là, je n’osais rien dire de mes sentiments intérieurs; la
voie par laquelle je marchais était si droite, si lumineuse, que je ne
sentais pas le besoin d’un autre guide que Jésus ... je pensais que pour
moi, le bon Dieu ne se servait pas d’intermédiaire, mais agissait
directement.”

These are bold words for a young girl who had been reared in the most
rigid provincial piety, and had been taught to distrust private judgment
and regard her director as the representative of God. In them we see the
action of that strong will, power of initiative and clear conception of
her own needs and duties, which redeem her often emotional religious
fervour from insipidity. It is true that she can and does express that
fervour in the sentimental language which is the least attractive
element in French piety. The sense of a special relationship and special
destiny which more and more possessed her, far exceeded her powers
either of realization or of expression; and unfortunately impelled her
to describe herself as the “fleurette,” the “petite fiancée,” even the
“jouet” of Jesus, and to note in too many casual happenings evidence of
“les delicatesses du bon Dieu pour moi.” Yet we cannot forget that
similar declarations, equally offensive to modern taste, abound in some
of the greatest historical mystics, and that their full unpleasantness
is only mitigated to us by the quaint and archaic phrases in which they
are expressed. Whilst no doubt these declarations represent the invasion
of human desires and instincts into the field of spiritual experience,
its natural craving for protection and personal love; they also witness
to the mystic’s intense personal consciousness of close communion, a
consciousness which far transcends the poor vocabulary and commonplace
symbols through which it must be told.

Therefore we cannot dismiss Thérèse Martin as a mere victim of religious
emotionalism, because her mental equipment is inadequate to her
spiritual experience. When, moreover, we remember the amazing vigour and
tenacity of purpose with which, when barely fifteen, this gentle and
home-loving child, driven by her strong sense of vocation, planned and
carried through a lifelong separation from the father she adored and the
world of nature she loved, we are bound to acknowledge in her an element
of greatness, a strong and an adventurous soul. With a certitude of her
own duty which nothing could shake, Thérèse interviewed on her own
behalf the Superior of the order, who snubbed her, and the Bishop of the
diocese, who was kind but prevaricated with her; demanding from them
permission to take the veil at once, instead of waiting till the usual
age of twenty-one. Further, being taken by her father to Rome with a
party of French pilgrims, when they were all received by the Pope she
had the courage to address him directly—although the priest in charge of
the pilgrimage forbade it—and asked for his support. The end of it was
that she at last convinced the authorities of her special vocation, and
was allowed to become a postulant in the most austere of all religious
orders at the unheard-of age of fifteen.

Her career as a Carmelite was far from being the succession of mystical
enjoyments, the basking in divine sunshine, which some imagine the
contemplative life to be. She now experienced the common lot of the
“proficient” in the mystic way; paying for her religious exaltation by
reactions, long periods of aridity, which were doubtless due in part to
psychic exhaustion. Then, in addition to the perpetual little
sacrifices, self-deprivations, and penances which she imposed on
herself, she seemed, as she says, to be plunged in a “terrible desert,”
a “profound night” of darkness and solitude; and prayer itself became
dreary and unreal. “Tout a disparu ... ce n’est plus un voile, c’est un
mur qui s’éleve jusqu’aux cieux et couvre le firmament étoilé.” But an
inner life which was nourished on the robust doctrine of St. John of the
Cross could bear this deprivation with fortitude, and make of inward
poverty itself a gain. Outwardly, too, her life was difficult. Her
superiors seem at once to have perceived in her that peculiar quality of
soul which is capable of sanctity; and since it is the ambition of every
community to produce a saint, they addressed themselves with vigour to
the stern task of educating Thérèse for her destiny. Still a child,
sensitive and physically delicate, she was spared no opportunity of
self-denial and mortification. Her most trifling deficiencies were
remarked, her most reasonable desires thwarted, her good points ignored.
When her health began to fail under a rule of life far beyond her
strength, and the first signs of tuberculosis—that scourge of the
cloister—appeared in her, the Prioress, in her ferocious zeal for souls,
even refused to dispense the ailing girl from attendance at the
night-office. “Une âme de cette trempe, disait-elle, ne doit pas être
traité comme une enfant, les dispenses ne sont pas faites pour elle.
Laissez-la. Dieu la soutient.”

This drastic training did its work. Thérèse had a heroic soul, though
her courage and generosity found expression for the most part in small
and obscure ways. She has said that she felt in herself the longing to
be a soldier, an apostle, a martyr; and within the limits of the
cloister, she found means of satisfying these desires. “Elle
accomplissait simplement des actes héroïques,” said the Superior after
her death. Determined, in her own metaphor, to be a “victime d’amour,”
her brave spirit never faltered in its willing acceptance of pain. She
hid her mental and physical sufferings, fought her increasing weakness,
ate without hesitation the rough food which made her ill, refused every
comfort and amelioration. By this hard yet humble way she rose in a few
years to the heights of perfect self-conquest and moral perfection:
passing through suffering to a state in which love, and total
self-giving for love, was realized by her as the central secret of the
spiritual life. “La charité me donna la clef de ma vocation.... Enfin,
je l’ai trouvée. Ma vocation, c’est l’amour.”

In this completed love, stretching from the smallest acts of service to
the most secret experiences of the soul, she found—as every mystic has
done—that unifying principle of action which alone gives meaning to
life. In its light all problems were solved, and the meaning of all
experiences was disclosed. So Julian of Norwich, fifteen years after her
first revelation, was answered in ghostly understanding: “Wouldest thou
wit thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Wit it well, Love was his meaning.
Who showed it thee? Love. What showed he thee? Love. Wherefore showed it
he? For love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt wit and know more in the
same; but thou shalt never know nor wit therein other thing without
end.” To live in this supernatural charity is to introduce into the
world of succession the steadfast values of eternity; hence this
quality, so simple yet so difficult of attainment, is the one essential
character of the saints. “Pour atteindre à la vie idéale de l’âme,” said
Elizabeth Catez, who so greatly exceeded her fellow-Carmelite in
philosophic grasp, though not in moral beauty, “je crois qu’il faut
vivre dans le surnaturel, prendre conscience que Dieu est au plus intime
de nous, et aller à tout avec lui: alors on n’est jamais banal, même en
faisant les actions les plus ordinaires, car on ne vit pas en ces
choses, on les dépasse. Une âme surnaturelle ne traite pas avec les
causes secondes, mais avec Dieu seulement ... pour elle, tout se reduite
à l’unité.”

Thérese de l’Enfant-Jésus came to this consummation by way of a total
and generous self-abandonment in all the daily incidents of life; a love
which consecrated “les actions les plus ordinaires.” She took as her
favourite saint the Curé d’Ars, because “he loved his family so deeply,
and only did ordinary things.” This was the “little pathway” to the
heart of Reality, on which, she thought, all might travel and none could
miss the road. “Aux âmes simples, il ne faut pas des moyens compliqués.”
Though the unquenchable thirst of her ardent nature for more suffering
and more love did more than once express itself by way of ecstatic
experience, she repudiated all abnormal “graces” and special
contemplative powers. “Je ne suis qu’un pauvre petit oiseau couvert
seulement d’un léger duvet; je ne suis pas un aigle, j’en ai simplement
les yeux et le cœur.” Her spiritual practice became simplified as she
grew in understanding. In the last years of her life the Gospels were
her only book of devotion, and her prayer became “un élan du cœur, un
simple regard jeté vers le ciel.” Yet the love thus expressed was no
mere “divine duet.” She was not a victim of that narrow fervour which
finds its satisfaction in a vertical relation with the Divine; her
religion was of a distinctly social type. “Le zêle d’une Carmelite doit
embrasser le monde,” she said; and this zeal showed itself, not only in
the passionate love she gave to her family, but in radiant affection
towards all living beings—the nuns in the convent, some of whom were
extremely tiresome and even unkind, her friends and correspondents in
the outside world, the animals and the birds. She always had her eye on
her fellow-creatures; she wanted to help them, to show light to them, to
save them. The eager service and voluntary mortifications of her life
closed with eighteen months of great physical suffering. She died in
September 1897, at the age of twenty-four.

Thérèse Martin had lived for nine years within the walls of a small,
strictly enclosed convent in a provincial town. This building and its
dreary little chapel formed the setting of her religious career. There
was nothing impressive in her surroundings, nothing to satisfy those
artistic instincts which she certainly possessed, to hint at the poetry
and mystery of the spiritual life. Her opportunities of action had been
limited on every side; her creative impulse found expression only in the
writing of some conventional religious verse, and the record of her
thoughts and experiences, composed not for publication, but as an act of
obedience to her Superior. Prayer, the teaching of novices, the family
life of the community, and a small amount of correspondence with those
in the world, were the only channels through which her passionate love
of humanity could flow. This record may not sound impressive. Its sequel
is amazing. Students of history have often discussed the stages and the
circumstances through which a simple man or woman, distinguished only by
a beautiful and humble life, has been transformed by the reverence,
love, and myth-making faculty of his contemporaries into a supernatural
being endowed with magical powers. This transformation has happened
within our own time in the person of Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus. This
young girl, whose life was marked by no bizarre incident, who was
brought up in an obscure Norman town, and deliberately shut herself up
in a convent of strictest enclosure to remain—as the “healthy-minded”
would say—buried alive till her death, is now loved and invoked wherever
the Roman Catholic church is established. Her short and uneventful life
has influenced and comforted countless other lives. Her “cause” has been
introduced, and although she is not yet canonized, she is already
regarded as numbered among the saints. To visit her grave in the
beautiful hillside cemetery outside Lisieux, and watch the endless
stream of pilgrims who come on every day of the year from all parts of
the world to ask her help, to deposit letters explaining their needs,
and lay on her tomb for blessing the clothes of babies or the food of
the sick, is to understand what the shrine of a mediæval saint must have
been like. It is to understand also something of the triumphant power of
character, and of the fact that the enclosing of a radiant personality
within the cloister is not burying it alive.

Although the whole of her short adult life had been passed behind the
high garden walls of the convent, and after she took the veil only the
members of her family had seen her—and this under the most restricted
conditions—yet at the time of her death Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus was
already known and valued by the whole town. That death was an event of
importance, evoking an extraordinary demonstration of affection and
reverence. The events which followed it are of deep interest. Here, in
our own day, we have the swift rise and diffusion of a _cultus_ exactly
similar to those which followed the deaths of the great popular saints
of the Middle Ages. Every element is present; the prompt setting up of a
pilgrimage, the veneration of the tomb, the distribution of relics—at
the Lisieux convent cards are sold, bearing splinters and bits of straw
from the cell of Thérèse—countless reports of visions, conversions,
“supernatural perfumes,” and miraculous answers to prayer. The
literature of the subject is already considerable, and a journal is
published giving details of “graces” obtained by her help. The causes
which lie behind such religious movements as this are still obscure; but
we have in the cult of Thérèse Martin a valuable clue by which to
interpret those reported from the past. Her “miracles,” in which
students of psychic phenomena will find much to interest them, range
from the cure of cancer to the multiplication of bank-notes, and even
include the restoration of dead geranium-cuttings. Many are obviously
explained by coincidence or hallucination, some are admirable examples
of faith-healing. But a few, apparently supported by good evidence, seem
to defy rationalistic explanation.

The cult quickly lost its local and ultimately its national character.
Though French Catholicism rightly claims Thérèse as its peculiar
possession, and devotion to her is probably more general in France than
elsewhere, yet she is now venerated in every country in the world, and
distributes her favours without regard to nationality. Scotland and
America in particular have numerous stories of her benevolent
intervention, at least as evidential as much that is offered to us by
the exponents of spiritualism. Her legend is in active formation, and
many picturesque incidents were added to it during the war. She is even
said to have appeared at the British Headquarters, and given advice at a
critical moment of the campaign. A large proportion of the Catholic
soldiers who fought for France probably placed themselves under her
protection, and attribute their safety to her care.

A little time before her death, she said to her sister Pauline, “Une
seule attente fait battre mon cœur; c’est l’amour que je recevrai et
celui que je pourrai donner.... Je veux passer mon ciel à faire du bien
sur la terre,” and again, “Je compte bien ne pas rester inactive au
ciel, mon désir est de travailler encore.” In these sayings, so unlike
in their vigorous activism the conventional aspirations of the devout,
we have probably the germinal point of her _cultus_. It has come to be
believed that this simple and loving spirit, who passed from the body
with so many generous longings unfulfilled, is indeed spending her
heaven in doing good; and the deeds attributed to her are just those
practical and friendly acts of kindness, through which during life she
expressed and perfected her spirit of love.


                                   II
                            LUCIE-CHRISTINE


Those students of mysticism who feel that the purely cloistered type of
spirituality, as seen in Thérèse Martin and Elizabeth Catez, is too
remote from the common experience to be actual to us, may find something
with which they can sympathize and from which they can learn, in the
self-revelations of the remarkable contemplative who is known under the
pseudonym of Lucie-Christine.

This lady, whose spiritual journal was published in 1912, was a married
woman of the leisured class, leading the ordinary life of a person of
her type and position. She was born in 1844 and married in 1865. She had
five children. At forty-three she became a widow, and in 1908, after
nineteen years of blindness, she died at the age of sixty-four. Nothing
could have been more commonplace than her external circumstances. On the
religious side she was an exact and fervent Roman Catholic, accepting
without question the dogmas and discipline of the Church, and diligent
in all the outward observances of conventional French piety. Her time
was spent in family and social duties, sometimes in Paris, sometimes in
her country home; and she appeared to her neighbours remarkable only for
her goodness, gentleness, and love of religion. Yet her inward
life—unsuspected by any but her parish priest, for whom her journal was
written—had a richness and originality which entitle her to a place
among the Catholic mystics, and often help us to understand the meaning
and character of the parallel experiences which those mystics describe.
The value for study of a contemplative who is at once so modern and so
classic is obvious. This value is increased by the fact that for many
years Lucie-Christine knew nothing of mystical literature, and was
ignorant even of the names of the spiritual states which her journal so
faithfully describes. Therefore in her case unconscious imitation, which
accounts for much so-called mystical experience, appears to be excluded.

Her journal—at present our only source of information—covers
thirty-eight years: from 1870 to 1908. The first twelve years, however,
are only represented by fragmentary notes, put together in 1882; when
Lucie-Christine, at the suggestion of her confessor, began to keep a
detailed record of her religious life. Whatever view we may take of its
theological value, this record is certainly a psychological document of
the first class. It is the work of a woman of marked intelligence;
temperamentally philosophic, and with great intuitional gifts. The short
memoir prefixed to the French edition tells us that even as a child she
showed unusual qualities; was grave, thoughtful, and to some extent
“psychic,” being subject to flashes of clairvoyance, and premonitions of
important and tragic events. This peculiarity, which she disliked and
never spoke of, persisted through life; and its presence in her helps us
to understand how the many stories of abnormal power possessed by the
mystics first arose.

Her character was by no means of that detached and inhuman type which is
supposed to be proper to religious exaltation. She was ardent and
impressionable, gave love and craved for it; her qualities and faults
were essentially of a lovable kind. She reveals herself in her journal
as sensitive, idealistic, and affectionate; somewhat unpractical, very
easily wounded, tempted to irritability, and inclined to worry. “The
excessive wish to be loved, appreciated, admired by those whom I love,”
was one of the temptations against which, as a young woman, she felt it
necessary to pray: another was the longing for enjoyment, for personal
happiness. It was only after eight years of intermittent mystical
experience that she learned the secret of inward peace: to “lose her own
interests in those of God, and receive a share in His interests in
exchange.” Though the “activity and practical capacity of Martha” never
came naturally to her, she was yet a splendid wife and mother. Even in
the years when her inner life was passed in almost continuous
contemplation, she never neglected human duties for superhuman joys; but
planned and shared the amusements of her boys and girls, wrote and
rehearsed the plays which they acted, and watched with care over every
detail of their lives.

Her spiritual life developed gradually and evenly. There is no trace in
it of any psychic storm or dramatic conversion. She grew up in a
religious home, and even in childhood seems to have been attracted to
silent devotion or “mental prayer.” As a girl she was a vital, impulsive
creature, full of eager enthusiasms. That deep, instinctive longing for
Perfection which makes one man an artist, another a philosopher, and
another a saint, showed itself early in a passionate worship of all
beautiful things. “Tout ce que je connaissais de beau me passionnait et
entraînait toute mon âme. La première vue de la mer et des falaises
m’arracha des larmes.... Je ne pouvais trouver l’expression qui
traduisît assez l’ardeur dont le beau enflammait mon imagination, et je
ne voyais pas d’inconvénients à ces entraînements excessifs; au
contraire, je m’y livrais de toute la force de ma volonté. Infortunée,
mon âme en revenait cependant avec le sentiment du vide et de
l’insuffisance, et c’est alors qu’elle rejetait son activité dévorante
sur l’idéal qui lui réservait tant de dangers! Moins altérée du beau, je
me fusse peut-être contentée des choses réelles, mais comme le coureur,
lancé dans un fol élan, dépasse le but, ainsi mon âme s’élançait vers le
beau à peine aperçu et cherchait encore au delà.”

In this important passage we see the true source of Lucie’s mysticism.
It was the craving for an absolute and unchanging loveliness on which to
expend her large-hearted powers of adoration and self-giving, which led
her like the Platonists through visible beauty to its invisible source.
She had, as she says of herself in a sudden flash of ironic wit, “le
cœur assez mal placé pour trouver Dieu plus aimable que le monde, et
l’esprit assez étroit pour se contenter de l’Infini”; but it was not
until youth was nearly over, and she had been married for eight years,
that she found what she sought. One day, when she was meditating as
usual on a passage in the _Imitation of Christ_, she saw and heard
within her mind the words “Dieu seul!”—summing up and answering in one
phrase the vague efforts and questions of her growing mystical sense,
and offering to the hungry psyche the only satisfaction of desire. As
Fox was released from his conflict by the inner voice which cried,
“There is one only who can speak to thy condition,” so this inner voice,
says Lucie (whom it greatly astonished), “fut à la fois une lumière, un
attrait, et une force. Une lumière qui me fit voir comment je pouvais
être complètement à Dieu seul dans le monde, et je vis que jusque-là je
ne l’avais pas bien comprit. Un attrait par lequel mon cœur fut subjugué
et ravi. Une force qui m’inspira une résolution généreuse et me mit en
quelque sorte dans les mains les moyens de l’exécuter, car le propre de
ces paroles divines est d’opérer ce qu’elles disent.”

We see at once the complete and practical character of her reaction to
the divine; the promptitude with which she makes the vital connection
between intuition and act. St. Teresa said that the object of the
spiritual marriage was “the incessant production of work.” So for
Lucie-Christine that sure consciousness of the Presence of God which now
became frequent, “clothing and inundating” her as she sat alone at her
sewing or took part in some social activity, called her above all to
“faire les petites choses du dévouement journalier avec amour”;
conquering her natural irritability and dislike for the boredoms and
unrealities of a prosperous existence. “N’avoir jamais l’air ennuyé des
autres. Que de fois je manque à ceci avec les pauvres enfants. Vous êtes
ennuyeux! C’est bien vite dit! Est-ce une amabilité divine?”

More and more, as her mystical consciousness grew, the life of
contemplation became her delight; and it was plainly a real trial to be
distracted from it for trivial purposes. In company, or busied with
household duties, she went for hours with “her soul absorbed, its better
part rapt in God.” She “tried to appear ordinary,” and made excuses if
her abstraction was observed; but there are a few entries in her journal
which will give pleasure to those who condemn mysticism as an
“anti-social type of religion.” “Nous avons été nous promener, quatorze.
Je remarque que d’aller ainsi avec plusieurs ‘Marthes’ hommes ou femmes,
cela ne fait rien. On laisse discourir, on met un mot de temps en temps,
mais, en définitive, on demeure bien libre et l’oraison va toute seule.
Mais avec une seule Marthe, que c’est terrible! La tête-à-tête oblige à
causer presque tout le temps.”

When Lucie wrote this, ten years after her first illuminative
experience, she was far advanced in contemplation. She had known that
direct and ineffable vision of God “Himself the True, the Good, the
Beautiful; all things being nothing save by Him” which is
characteristic—though she knew it not—of the unitive way: known too the
corresponding experience of dereliction, when the door which had opened
on Eternity seemed tightly closed. It would be tedious to analyze in
detail the rich profusion of mystic states which she had already
exhibited: the degrees of contemplation, ecstasies, visions and voices,
all the forms taken by her growing intuition of the Transcendent. Many
of these can be matched in the writings of the great mystics. Again and
again as we read her, we are reminded of Angela of Foligno, Ruysbroeck,
Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Genoa, even of Plotinus: yet
Lucie-Christine was at this time ignorant of mystical literature, and
only in later life found with amazement descriptions of her own
experiences in the works of the great contemplatives.

These experiences had a wide range. Some we are justified in regarding
as invasions from her deeper self; coming to the rescue of the often
distracted surface personality, and correcting the impressions of the
outer world by its own intimations of Eternity. Thus, in 1875, she
confesses that being particularly worried by a number of people, the
Divine voice said to her, “Ma fille, il n’y a que toi et moi.” She
replied: “Seigneur, et les autres?” The voice said: “Pour chaque âme en
ce monde il n’y a que moi et elle, toutes les autres âmes et toutes
choses ne sont rien pour elle que par moi et pour moi,” and by this
timely reminder of the one Reality in whose life she lived, and by and
in whom alone all other lives are real, she was recalled to her inner
poise.

In assessing the value of this, and many other of her revelations, we
have to remember that Lucie-Christine was a fervent and exact
Churchwoman. Her belief was literal. She felt no discord between
traditional Christianity of the most concrete kind and the freedom of
her own communion with God. The fruits of that communion were often
expressed by her in theological terms, and the special atmosphere and
tendencies of French Catholicism certainly affected the form of many of
her contemplations. Thus at one end of the scale her passionate devotion
to the Person of Christ, and the fact that her religious practice
centred in the Eucharist, sometimes resulted in visions of a distinctly
anthropomorphic type. In these, her intuition of God’s presence
translated themselves into hallucinatory images of the Face of Christ,
or of His eyes looking at her; or photisms, which she explained to
herself as the radiance emanating from His person. As we all know, such
dramatizations of mystical emotion are comparatively commonplace. The
elements from which the self constructs them are by no means all of a
spiritual kind; and experienced mystics agree in regarding them with
much suspicion. A careful study of Lucie-Christine’s journal forces us
to admit, that the deliberate passivity which she cultivated often
placed her at the mercy of her instinctive nature; and that its hidden
wishes sometimes took a devotional form. To this source, too, we must
refer those “obsessions and temptations”—in other words, uprushes from
the lower centres—by which she was often attacked during contemplation,
and also the occasionally sentimental and emotional character of her
reactions to the Divine.

These objections, however, do not apply to the remarkable “metaphysical
visions”—sharp onsets of real transcendental consciousness—in which her
innate passion for the Absolute found satisfaction. Then, as she says,
God seemed to “put aside all intermediaries between Himself and the
soul;” and “bathed and irradiated by the Divine substance” she became
“aware of the Divine Abyss,” or perceived, as Julian of Norwich did,
“the Universe in a point,” swallowed up in the simple yet overwhelming
sight of God. Here lie, for us, the real interest and value of
Lucie-Christine’s confessions. She shares with Angela of Foligno and a
few other historical mystics the double apprehension of the Divine
Nature under its personal and impersonal forms; and as both utterly
transcendent to, yet completely immanent in, the human soul. In her
descriptions of these visions, this woman unread in philosophy displays
a grasp of the philosophic basis of religion which would do credit to a
trained theologian. Thus she says, “Il n’y a pas, ce me semble, de vue
intérieure qui égale celle de l’essence divine. Mon âme était comme
environnée de la substance divine en laquelle elle voyait ce caractère
essentiel qui nous est révelé par le mystère de la Sainte Trinité,
c’est-à-dire qu’il y a en Dieu l’unité et la distinction, le tout et le
particulier, et je sentais combien c’est folie de chercher quelque chose
en dehors de lui.” Again, “Étant profondément unie à lui dans la Sainte
Communion, je vis Dieu en tant qu’il est le souverain bien, et je
compris en même temps que le mal n’est que la négation du bien, un pur
_néant_.... Dans cette vue intellectuelle, je compris aussi combien sera
grande la confusion des pécheurs quand ils seront jugés, et qu’ils
verront que tout le mal qu’ils ont aimé, préconisé, adoré, se réduit au
néant! Avoir aimé le néant, avoir vécu pour lui, et perdre pour lui
l’Etre éternel!” Here Lucie’s view of sin is that characteristic of all
mystics; who can seldom be persuaded, however orthodox they may be in
other respects, that anything which is not good is real. We remember how
Julian of Norwich, also a natural contemplative of philosophic
temperament, says, “I saw not sin; for I believe it has no manner of
substance nor part of being.”

As an analyzer of her own psychological states, Lucie-Christine had
something of that genius which St. Teresa possessed in a supreme degree;
and she has, perhaps, an added value for us because she speaks not from
the past nor from the cloister, but out of the Paris of our own day. We
owe to her one of our most vivid descriptions of that apprehension of
Eternal Life—the immersion of our durational existence in the Absolute
Life of God—which Von Hügel regards as the fundamental religious
experience. “J’ai observé,” she says, “que pendant l’oraison passive et
surtout dans l’état d’union, l’âme perd le sentiment de la durée. Il n’y
a plus pour elle de succession de moments, mais un moment unique, et
j’ai cru comprendre qu’étant élevée à cet état, l’âme y vit selon le
mode de vivre de l’éternité, où il n’y a point de durée, point de passé
ni d’avenir, mais un moment unique, infini.” We have again to remember
that the woman who wrote this had then no acquaintance with the classics
of mysticism. It is her own impression which she is trying to register.

Again, consider this account of the state of divine union as she had
known it: “L’âme va prier, elle s’élance pour franchir la distance qui
la sépare de l’Infini, et cette distance elle ne la trouve plus! Elle
veut aller à vous, mon Dieu, et vous êtes en elle!... Perdue en vous,
elle oublie ellemême et tout le reste, elle ne sait plus comment elle
vit, ni comment elle aime; elle ne voit plus que Vous seul. Encore ne
peut elle pas _penser_ qu’elle vous voit et vous adore; car ce serait se
voir elle-même, et en de tels moments elle ne se voit pas, elle ne voit
que Vous. Elle connaît et aime par un mode nouveau et incompréhensible,
qui est en dehors et infiniment au-dessus de l’exercice ordinaire de ses
facultés. Elle sent que l’opération de Dieu a pris la place de la sienne
et que c’est Dieu même qui opère en elle la connaissance et l’amour.”

This sense of complete surrender to a larger life and greater power, of
which love is the very substance and ground, is characteristic of nearly
all high mystical experience; and the literature of contemplation would
furnish many parallels to all that Lucie tells us of it. In this state,
as she says in another place, “the thirst of the spirit is suddenly
fulfilled by the Infinite,” and “God takes possession of the ground of
the soul, without passage of time or feeling of space.” Then, the
bewilderment and unrest produced in us by the disharmonies of daily life
are healed. “Là où tout raisonnement échoue,” she says in one of her
most beautiful passages; “où l’âme est tellement troublée qu’elle ne
saurait même expliquer ce qui la trouble, la divine presence paraît, et
soudain le vertige cesse et la paix renaît avec la lumière.”
Consciousness, ceasing more or less completely its normal
correspondences with the temporal order, then becomes aware of the
eternal and spiritual universe in which we really live.

Such an attitude to Eternity was a marked characteristic of
Lucie-Christine’s mysticism. Often, it produced in her the complete
mono-ideism of ecstasy; and she describes the oncoming, content, and
passing of these states with a minuteness which makes her journal a
valuable document for the psychologist. Constantly, the intense
awareness of the Divine Presence persisted through the many duties and
activities of the day; “like a grave and tender note, dominating all the
modulations of the keyboard of my exterior life.” She is not afraid to
use the most violent metaphors, the most concrete images, in her efforts
to express the intensity and reality of this spiritual life that she
leads, this divine companionship that she enjoys. “I am nourished by
God’s substance.” “I breathe the divine essence.” “The presence of God
is so clear that faith is not faith—it is sight.” “The soul plays within
God, as within a limitless universe.” “The Divine action penetrates and
transforms my adoration. It is the Divine Being who thinks, loves, and
lives within me.” None of the mystics have gone further than this in
their claims; but it is significant that nearly all the greatest go as
far.

Yet in all this, Lucie-Christine is strictly Evangelical. She was a
Christian first, and a mystic afterwards. Though her expressions may
seem startling, her mysticism never goes beyond that of St. John and St.
Paul; and her most Platonic utterances can be justified by the New
Testament. But the Pauline and Johannine teachings on the soul’s union
with Christ are not for her merely doctrinal statements. They are vivid
descriptions of states she has personally known, when her consciousness
truly penetrated to that “région d’amour, région unique, où l’âme trouve
un autre jour, une autre vie, un autre air respirable, où du moins tous
ces éléments latents se trouvent manifestés, où Dieu seul apparaît, et
tout le reste rentre dans l’ombre.”

Such a personal and overwhelming consciousness of “the greatness, power,
and simplicity of God”—an all-inclusive unity which the unity of her
spirit could comprehend—was the central interest of her life. She
certainly tended to that which Baron von Hügel has called “the vertical
relation” with the Divine. Nevertheless, this theocentric existence did
not involve either the limp passivity or the spiritual selfishness with
which it is sometimes charged. On the ethical side it committed her to a
constant moral discipline; for her ardent and impulsive temperament
reacted too easily to every external stimulus. “I must give up
pleasure—never work for my own enjoyment.” “My one prayer is, that I may
not feel joy and grief so vividly: that I may feel only Thee.” This
deliberate unselfing and concentration on God so strengthened the fibres
of character that she was able to bear with quietness her many personal
sorrows, and the long years of blindness—a bitter cross for that keen
lover of beauty—which closed her life. Yet it did not muffle her in the
unattractive folds of “holy indifference.” She loved her family
devotedly, and felt without mitigation the anxieties and griefs of human
life. Her attitude to others was generous and sympathetic. God, she
says, gives Himself to us that we may give Him again. His unique light
must pass through the soul as through a prism; breaking up into the many
colours of word and deed, forgiveness and good counsel, prayer and alms,
self-forgetfulness and self-giving. Though exceedingly reserved about
her spiritual experiences, which were only known to her confessor, the
influence of these experiences was felt by those among whom she lived;
and her house was known by them as “the house of peace.”

Moreover, her love for the institutional and sacramental side of
religion saved her from many of the dangers and extravagances of
individualism. It gave her a framework within which her own intuitions
could find their place; and a valid symbolism through which she could
interpret to herself the most rarefied experiences of her soul. She is
an example of the way in which the mystic seems able to achieve the
universal without losing or rejecting its particular expression:
assimilating symbols of an amazing crudity without in any way impairing
her vision of truth. The conflict between that vision and the concrete
objectives of popular devotion was ignored by her; as it is generally
ignored by practical mystics of the institutional type. She, who had
touched the Absolute in her contemplations, was yet deeply impressed by
the drama of the Church; by its ceremonies, holy places, festivals,
consecrations. Her inner life was nourished by its sacraments. She
displayed the power—so characteristic of Christian mysticism at its
best—of transcending without rejecting the formulæ of belief as commonly
understood; of remaining within, and drawing life from, the organism,
without any diminution in the proper liberty of the soul.

Thus, seen as a whole, Lucie-Christine’s spiritual life has a richness
and balance which reflects the richness and balance of her own nature;
for an impoverished or one-sided character was never yet found capable
of a fully developed and fruitful mysticism. We see her from girlhood
seeking to satisfy her innate longing for reality; urged on the one hand
by the artist’s craving for perfect loveliness, on the other by the
philosopher’s instinct for Eternity. When the veil was lifted, and the
inner voice said, “God only!” she found at once the reconciliation and
the fulfilment of these two desires. The long and varied experience
which followed was no more than an unfolding of the content of those
words. They revealed to her the Substance of all beauty and truth;
shining in that world of appearance which she loved to the last with an
artist’s passion, yet ever abiding unchanged in that world of pure being
which she touched in her contemplations “above all feeling, image, and
idea.” Because of this double outlook on reality, her mysticism was both
transcendental and sacramental. It irradiated the natural world, and
also the symbols of religion, with that simple light of Eternity wherein
she found “all beauties known and unknown, all harmonies natural and
supernatural.” Lucie-Christine makes clear to us, as few mystics have
done, the immense transfiguration of ordinary life which comes from such
an extension of consciousness; when “the veil suddenly drops, God
reveals Himself, and the soul _knows_ experimentally that which she knew
not before.” Her journal is full of passages in which its joy and
splendour are described. I take one written in a time of great mental
and physical suffering, when the cruel deprivations of blindness were
already closing in on her, and the two beings she loved best—her husband
and her youngest daughter—had lately been taken from her by death.
“Figurez-vous un pauvre prisonnier au fond d’un cachot renfermé et
obscur, voyant tout à coup s’entr’ouvrir la voûte de ce cachot, et par
là recevant la lumière du soleil, et aspirant avec force l’air du dehors
qui lui arrive embaumé des senteurs de la vie et de la chaleur de
l’atmosphère resplendissante. Ainsi mon âme s’ouvrait, et buvait Dieu!
... mon âme aspirait et buvait la vie même de la Trinité Sainte, et se
sentait revivre, et n’avait plus aucun mal.”


                                  III
                             CHARLES PÉGUY


In the turmoil and anxieties of the first weeks of the war, few people
observed that France had lost upon the battle-field one of the greatest
of her modern poets; a fearless and original thinker, a constructive
mystic, who exercised a unique influence over the young writers and
thinkers of his world. Yet the death in action of Charles Péguy, who was
killed on September 5, 1914, at the age of forty-one, removed a striking
figure from contemporary literature, and was among the chief
intellectual losses sustained by France in the war.

Born in Orleans in 1873, of peasant stock, Péguy had many of the
fundamental qualities of the French peasant; the sturdy independence,
the frugal tastes, the untiring industry, the close kinship with the
soil. His father was a cabinet-maker; his mother that familiar figure of
the cathedrals, the woman who lets the chairs. The great friend of his
boyhood was an old republican carpenter with whom he used to talk, and
to whose conversation he owed his first political ideas. This heredity
and these influences gave to his thought and attitude a character which
he never lost. In his mature work we see side by side the result of
those two compensating elements in his childish environment; the mingled
mystery and homeliness of that mediæval and intensely national
Catholicism which finds in the French cathedrals its living symbols, the
keen sense of social justice, of the need for social salvation, which
inspired the popular republicanism of the years following the
Franco-German war. These characteristics, which afterwards, in a
sublimated form, came to dominate his mysticism and gave to it its
special colour, its mingling of antique tradition with forward-looking
hope, can be traced back to the blend of Christian and of democratic
impressions which he received as a child. Perhaps only the son of French
peasants could understand and reinterpret as he had done the figure of
St. Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who saved France; and whose longing to
mend and redeem, at once so practical and so transcendental, linked up
the objectives of social endeavour and of faith.

Brought up within the atmosphere of provincial piety, Péguy rose from
the elementary school to the lycée; and at nineteen, through his own
efforts and his mother’s sacrifices, passed from Orleans to the
University of Paris. There his vigorous mind and positive character soon
made him the centre of a group of students, over whom he quickly
obtained influence. There, too, he made the transition—almost inevitable
for an ardent young man of his world—from Catholic orthodoxy to
humanitarian socialism: the first stage in his spiritual pilgrimage, and
the first attempt to answer that question which underlies all his
thought and act, his poetry and controversy—“Comment faut-il sauver?”
These words, which Péguy puts into the mouth of St. Joan of Arc, and
shows to us as the mainspring of her actions, define too the secret
impulse of his own career. His mysticism was not that of the
contemplative, the solitary and God-intoxicated devotee: it was that of
a strong-willed man of action, who sees far off the “mighty beauty” and
longs to actualize it within the common life. He saw that common life
with the eyes of a poet who was also a child of the people; discerning
beneath its surface the dignity and the beauty of its antique and simple
types—the spinner and the tiller, the housewife, the mother and the
child.

             “Les armes de Jésus, c’est la pauvre famille,
             Les frères et la sœur, les garçons et la fille,
             Le fuseau lourd de laine et la savante aiguille.”

But he found in the French socialism of the ’nineties a dry and
materialistic spirit; which could not satisfy his passionate idealism,
his instinct for a completed life, a universal redemption, that should
harmonize soul and body and fulfil their needs. Hence, by a process too
gradual to be called a conversion, he grew from humanitarianism into a
somewhat anti-clerical, original, yet mediæval and mystical Catholicism;
in which those ideals and demands which had dominated his humanitarian
period—the sense of the rights and dignity of mankind, the longing to
save, “de porter remède au mal universel humain”—reappear in a
spiritualized form. In Christianity he saw condensed the saving power of
Spirit; never letting man alone, but redeeming him even in defiance of
his own will, contriving its victories by or in spite of the evils and
disharmonies of life. The belief which he achieved—doubtless fed by
childish memories—was absolute and literal, and most easily expressed
itself in mediæval forms. Modernism filled him with horror; he desired
no attenuation of the supernatural, no reinterpretation of dogma. The
faith which fought the crusades and built the Cathedrals was that in
which he felt at home, and which he believed himself destined to bring
back to the soul of France: “Au fond, c’est une renaissance Catholique
qui se fait par moi.”

Yet his inner life was full of difficulty and unhappiness. There were in
him two strains, two warring impulses, to which we must attribute many
of the griefs and disappointments of his life: for his great
accomplishment both as poet and as founder of the _Cahiers de la
Quinzaine_ brought him little personal joy. On one side of his nature he
was proud, vehement, combative; full of a destructive energy, an
obstinate fanaticism, which found vent in his violent political
pamphlets, often expressing with the uncouth vigour of the peasant his
uncompromising hates and loves. Though so ardent a Christian, he was
neither meek nor gentle. He could never resist giving blow for blow, and
by his impatience and intolerance alienated by turns his socialist and
Catholic friends. About 1910, having thus quarrelled with most of his
associates, he withdrew into a voluntary retirement, in which the
spiritual side of his divided temperament seems at last to have had some
opportunity of growth. His mystical poems—all composed between 1910 and
1913—show to us the love and exaltation of which he now became capable;
the purity of that vision which had inspired his vigorous guerilla
warfare against the shams and sordidness of modern life, and which now
became the chief factor in his consciousness. Writing in 1912 to his old
friend Joseph Lotte, he says, “Mon vieux, j’ai beaucoup changé depuis
deux ans; je suis devenu un homme nouveau. J’ai tant souffert et tant
prié. Tu ne peux pas savoir.” The secret of this inner conflict, of the
terrible months during which, as he afterwards confessed, he was unable
to say “Thy will be done,” he revealed to none; but hints of the way by
which he had passed may be found in his poems. The mystical certitude
which inspires their most beautiful passages seems never to have
obtained complete control of his psychic being. The life of prayer and
the life of personal struggle persisted side by side, not fully
harmonized; and it is doubtful whether he ever achieved that complete
surrender to the divine action “in which alone we do not surrender our
true selves,” which is characteristic of the developed mystic life.
“Celui qui s’abandonne ne s’abandonne pas, et il est le seul qui ne
s’abandonne pas.” It was surely to himself that Péguy addressed this
observation, and it represents his own central need. Those profound
readjustments of character, that unselfing of the moral nature, which
must precede spiritual unification, and so are the only foundations of
inner peace, had never been accomplished in him. Like his patroness and
heroine St. Joan, he combined the temperaments of fighter and dreamer,
but he never succeeded in fusing them in one.

We know, too, something of the outward circumstances which added to his
difficulties. Married during his agnostic period to a freethinker, his
intense respect for human freedom forbade him to force on his wife his
own convictions, or even to bring his adored children to baptism against
their mother’s will. For this refusal he was himself denied access to
the sacraments; and hence this impassioned Catholic, for conscience’
sake, lived and died out of communion with the official Church. No one
will really understand Péguy’s position or the meaning of his poems,
unless this paradoxical situation, and this constant element of
frustration and incompleteness in his experience, be kept in mind. He
was in one sense an exile, ever gazing at the beloved country which he
knew and understood so much better than many of its citizens. Deeply
religious, he lived at odds with his religious world. Capable of the
strangest inconsistencies and refusals, though sparing himself nothing
of the anguish they involved, he could make on foot a pilgrimage to
Chartres to pray for the life of his sick child; yet would not face the
struggle necessary to make those children members of the Church in which
he believed. “Je ne peux pas m’occuper de tout. Je n’ai pas une vie
ordinaire. Nul n’est prophète en son pays. Mes petits ne sont pas
baptisés. A la sainte Vierge de s’en occuper!”

Himself, he felt called upon to devote his powers, without distraction,
to that missionary propaganda in which the mystical and combative sides
of his nature found creative expression, and to which his poetry and
much of his prose is consecrated. “Il y a tant de manque. Il y a tant à
demander,” says St. Joan to the patient nun who seeks to teach her
resignation: and here she expresses Péguy’s deepest conviction. There is
so much lacking that men might obtain of joy and peace and love. Action
no less than prayer is needed; every soul must take its share in meeting
the world’s need, for we are the accomplices of ill if we do nothing to
prevent it. There was never any place in Péguy’s eager and restless
heart for that “other-worldly” mysticism which achieves the love of God
at the expense of love of home and fellow-men; for religion in his view
was an affair of flesh and blood, not of pure spirit—not merely
transcendental, but concrete, national, fraternal, even revolutionary.
On this side his mysticism represents the spiritualization of that
activist philosophy which was coming into prominence in the formative
years of his life, and could not fail to exert a powerful influence on
him.

Both as mystic and as patriot, he had the reformer’s passion: a measure,
too, of the reformer’s violence and intolerant zeal. He worked for a
sweeter and a saner world, a restoration to man of his lost inheritance.
The modern France, he felt, was wrong. It had lost its hold upon
realities; mistaken its professors and scientists for apostles, its
codes and systems for truth, its political institutions for liberty, the
“triumphs of civilization” for perdurable goods. It had lost freshness,
naïveté, hope: had sacrificed beauty and joy for an imaginary progress
and comfort. In the place of the ancient types of human worth, the
primitive yet august figures of parent and child, craftsman and tiller
of the soil, it had produced the bemused victim of modern education
“avec sa tête de carton et son cœur de bazar.” In this perversion of
life and cultivation of the second-best he saw the “universal evil,”
which poisons the sources of human happiness. Yet behind and within it
Péguy, visionary and optimist, discerned the possible restoration of
good; mankind brought back into contact with the real and eternal world.
He saw his beloved France ceasing to be “un peuple qui dit non,” and
becoming, by intensity and harmony of action and vision, “une race
affirmative.” He looked past shams, pretences, and bad workmanship to a
heaven that should contain not only people but things: “Dans le paradis
tel que je le montrerai, il n’y aura pas seulement des âmes; il y aura
des choses. Tout ce qui existe et qui est réussi. Les cathédrales, par
exemple. Notre Dame, Chartres, je les y mettrai.”

It was such a restoration of humanity to the wholesome and beautiful
life for which it was made, that he had at first sought in socialism;
and the earlier numbers of the _Cahiers de la Quinzaine_, of which he
was the founder and editor, reflect this faith. He saw socialism then in
its ideal aspect, as a triumph of justice and love: a reasonable career
offered to the whole race. For this triumph, this reordering of the
common life, he never ceased to work; but a deeper experience taught him
that it could not be effected by any change imposed on society from
without, or any readjustment between man and man. The readjustment
needed was that between man and God; a change of heart, a rearrangement
of the values of life effected from within, which should make possible
the complete spiritualization of existence. Therefore it was that Péguy
became, in his last and most creative period, a Christian mystic of an
original type; an ardent missionary, who opposed the intellectualism,
materialism, and individualism which France of the early twentieth
century mistook for progress, by a propaganda which was
anti-intellectual, nationalist, and profoundly Catholic. It is to this
period that his poetry and much of his most vehement prose belongs. All
is didactic in intention; but is saved by its author’s wit, sincerity,
and remarkable imaginative genius from the usual fate of those who try
to turn art to the purposes of edification. The prose is largely
controversial, and inevitably suffers to some extent from this: for
Péguy was violent and sometimes unjust when attacking the errors and
follies of the time, and had at his disposal an astonishing power of
mockery, irony, and scorn. Yet even here, his instinct for beauty
constantly asserted itself: and in the midst of some biting attack upon
“progressive” politics or modernist theology, we get an abrupt invasion
of loveliness which transports us to the atmosphere of his poems. These
poems fall into two groups: first, the three _Mystères_ which he wrote
for the 500th anniversary of the birth of Jeanne d’Arc, “la sainte la
plus grande après Sainte Marie,” and which deal with her spiritual
preparation for the saving of France; _La Charité de Jeanne d’Arc_
(1910), _Le Porche du Mystère de la Deuxième Vertu_ (1911), _Les Saints
Innocents_ (1912). These are all written in unrhymed irregular verse; a
verse so indefinite in construction that it is often indistinguishable
from rhythmic prose. They consist chiefly in long meditative discourses,
alternating between the extremes of homeliness and sublimity, and put
into the mouths of Jeanne and of Madame Gervaise, a Franciscan nun to
whom she tells her problems and her dreams—an apt device for the
conveyance of Péguy’s own religious and patriotic gospel. They were
followed by three volumes in rhymed duodecasyllabic verse, which he
called _Tapisseries: Sainte Geneviève et Jeanne d’Arc_ (1912), _Notre
Dame_ (1913), and _Eve_ (1914), perhaps his finest and most sustained
single work.

When we examine these poems in order, we find that we can trace in them
the development of a consistent philosophy of life: for, like most of
the convinced opponents of intellectualism, Péguy was a profound
thinker, relying to a far greater extent than he would ever have
confessed on the ungodly processes of a singularly acute mind. The
deliberate simplicity of diction, the assumed ingenuousness of attitude
are deceptive, and conceal a deeply reasoned view of the universe.

                 “Je n’aime pas, dit Dieu, celui qui pense
                 Et qui se tourmente, et qui se soucie
                 Et qui roule une migraine perpétuelle.”

This is not the doctrine of the charcoal-burner; it is the doctrine of
the experienced philosopher, bitterly conscious of the limitations of
the brain.

The foundation of his creed is the essentially mystical belief, so
beautifully expressed in _Eve_, in the solidarity of the Universe. As
humanity is one and indivisible, so too the human and the divine cannot
be separated. “Nous sommes solidaires des damnés éternels,” he said when
he was twenty: and in his posthumous work _Clio_, he reiterates the same
truth. “Jésus est du même monde que le dernier des pécheurs; et le
dernier des pécheurs est du même monde que Jésus. C’est une communion.
C’est même proprement cela qui est une communion. Et à parler vrai ou
plutôt à parler réel il n’y a point d’autre communion que d’être du même
monde.” The spiritual and eternal world, then, is not something set over
against the natural order; but is closely entwined with it, the
neglected element of reality, which alone can make human existence
dignified and sweet.

              “Car le surnaturel est lui-même charnel
              Et l’arbre de la grâce est raciné profond
              Et plonge dans le sol et cherche jusqu’au fond,
              Et l’arbre de la race est lui-même éternel.

              Et l’éternité même est dans le temporel
              Et l’arbre de la grâce est raciné profond
              Et plonge dans le sol et touche jusqu’au fond
              Et le temps est lui-même un temps intemporel.“

What he realizes and points out, therefore, is not some distant
transcendental life and reality, divorced from our normal, flowing,
changing life and reality. Rather he insists on the beauty and nobility,
the deep spiritual quality of this immediate life; the supernatural
character of nature itself, when seen from the angle of Christian
idealism. The Blessed Virgin is herself:

                       “Infiniment céleste
               Parce qu’aussi elle est infiniment terrestre.”

In Christianity, with its incarnational philosophy, its balanced
cultivation of the active and the mystic life, its sacramental touch
upon all common things, he sees the only perfect expression of this
principle; the only power capable of embracing and spiritualizing the
whole of the rich complex of existence. Determined to bring home to his
fellow-countrymen, on the one hand, the concrete and objective nature of
this Christian life, on the other, the simplicity of soul necessary to
those who would understand it, he rejects all attempts at religious
philosophizing or symbolic interpretation. His treatment of theology is
characterized by a deliberate homely literalness, a naïve use of
tradition, which was intensely exasperating to his agnostic and
Modernist critics; and which may be found distasteful by some religious
minds, unable to realize the intimate connection between gaiety and
faith. To others it will seem that, alone amongst modern writers, he has
recaptured the mediæval secret of familiarity combined with adoration:
of a love, awe, and vision, a profound earnestness, which yet leave room
for laughter. His picture of God is shamelessly anthropomorphic. (“Je
suis honnête homme, dit Dieu; droit comme un Français.”) Yet it is full
of grave beauty, of the sense of fatherhood, the mystical consciousness
of the Divine desire. Revealed religion is God’s Word, and therefore
means what it says. “Jésus n’est pas venu pour nous dire des amusettes,”
says Madame Gervaise to Joan of Arc.

The faith which Péguy wished to restore to France was not the religious
rationalism of the modernist: still less the morbid, æsthetic fervour of
Huysmans. It was the homely everyday faith of the past, the humble yet
assured relation with the supernatural order, the courage and hope which
is rooted in tradition and is wholly independent of intellectual
subtleties. “La foi est toute naturelle, toute allante, tout simple,
toute venante”—the great and simple affirmation. The perfect type of
this faith is not the world-weary convert, but the healthy
unselfconscious child; and the child, for Péguy, is the most holy and
most significant figure in the human group. “C’est l’enfant qui est
plein et l’homme qui est vide.” Only in the child and in those
untarnished human beings who retain their childlike simplicity of heart
do we see unspoilt humanity: only in the child do we see incarnate hope.
“J’éclate tellement dans ma création,” says God, “et surtout dans les
enfants.”

           “On envoie les enfants à l’école, dit Dieu.
           Je pense que c’est pour oublier le peu qu’ils savent.
           On ferait mieux d’envoyer les parents à l’école.
           C’est eux qui en ont besoin
           Mais naturellement il faudrait une école de moi
           Et non pas une école d’hommes.”

The tenderness and charm of those passages in which he celebrates the
importance and sanctity of childhood, its innocence, its capacity for
growth, its virginal outlook, its freshness and power of response, place
him in the front rank of the poets who have treated this most difficult
subject, and constantly remind us of Blake:

    “Comme leur jeune regard a une promesse, une secrète assurance
       intérieure, et leur front, et toute leur personne.
    Leur petite, leur auguste, leur si révérente et révérende
       personne....
    Heureuse enfance. Tout leur petit corps, toute leur petite personne,
       tous leurs petits gestes, est pleine, ruisselle, regorge d’une
       espérance.
    Resplendit, regorge d’une innocence
    Qui est l’innocence même de l’espérance.”

This hope, the childhood of the heart, is to Péguy the most precious of
human qualities, and the one in which man draws nearest to an
understanding of the Divine Idea. Jesus is “the man who has hoped,” and
the Christian assault, which is the assault of hope, can alone make a
breach in the defences of eternity. It is “the faith that God loves
best”; the beginning of liberty, the growing point of the eager spirit
of life. Faith beholds that which is: Charity loves that which is: Hope
alone beholds and loves that which shall be. Faith is static; hope
dynamic. Faith is a great tree; hope is the rising sap, the little,
swelling bud upon the spray.

                     “La petite espérance
                     Est celle qui toujours commence”—

the persistent element in all effort and all change. She deceives us
twenty times running; yet she is the only one of our leaders who never
deceives us in the end. She gives significance to human toil, beauty and
meaning to human suffering, reality to human joy. In one of his most
beautiful verses, he describes the crowning of humanity with this
living, budding diadem of hope.

    “Comme une mère fait un diadème de ses doigts allongés, des doigts
       conjoints et affrontés de ses deux mains fraîches
    Autour du front brûlant de son enfant
    Pour apaiser ce front brûlant, cette fièvre,
    Ainsi une couronne éternelle a été tressée pour apaiser le front
       brûlant.
    Et c’était une couronne de verdure.
    Une couronne de feuillage.”

Moreover, “cette curieuse enfant Espérance” is the motive-power of the
spiritual order too. God Himself hopes for and in man: has placed His
eternal hope in man’s hands, and given to him, along with the gift of
liberty, the terrible power of frustrating or achieving the purposes of
Divine Love.

       “Le plus infirme des pécheurs peut découronner, peut couronner
       Une espérance de Dieu.”

Such a freedom is the very condition of spirituality; for faith, hope,
and charity are not servile virtues, but heavenward-tending impulses of
the free soul, activities of the will. Here lies their value; since only
in true love, voluntary service, deliberate choice, can the
possibilities of human nature be fulfilled:

    “Toutes les soumissions d’esclaves du monde, ne valent pas un beau
    regard d’homme libre.”

Therefore, for the author of this gospel of freedom and hope, the course
of salvation takes an exactly opposite course to that described by
Huysmans and his school. The typical soul for Péguy is not the
“twice-born” exhausted and fastidious sensualist Durtal, driven at last
to seek reconciliation by his overwhelming sense of sin. It is the
“once-born” simple and ardent peasant child, Joan of Arc; brought
straight from the sheepfold to serve the heroic purposes of God.

               “Tenant tout un royaume en sa ténacité
               Vivant en plein mystère avec sagacité
               Mourant en plein martyre avec vivacité
               La fille de Lorraine à nulle autre pareille.”

The typical experience is an experience of growth, freshness, novelty;
action rightly directed, and a vision which perceives beauty and dignity
in the antique and homely labours of the race. The cultivator of the
earth and the rearer of children, the faithful priest, the strong and
loyal soldier—of these is the kingdom of heaven. Of these and by these
the old France was built up; and through these ideals and virtues, and
the national saints in whom they are expressed, the new France may be
saved. With Huysmans in our mystical moments we are usually inside a
church, assisted by incense and plain-chant of the best quality: with
Péguy, we are in the open air, in the market garden, or in the nursery.
There his poetry, in Francis Thompson’s beautiful image, “plays at the
foot of the Cross.” Even the Holy Innocents in heaven are playing at
bowling hoops with their palms and crowns. “At least, I think so,” says
God, “for they never asked _My_ permission.”

    “Tel est mon paradis.... Mon paradis est tout ce qu’il y a de plus
       simple.”

Side by side with Péguy’s spiritual gospel, or rather entwined with it,
goes his practical and patriotic gospel. Since for him the whole of life
was crammed with spiritual significance, he saw in the patriotic passion
a sacrament of heavenly love, and in earthly cities symbols of the City
of God. Hence nationalism was to him, as to Dostoevsky, essentially
religious, and Joan of Arc—

                “Une humble enfant perdue en deux amours,
                L’amour de son pays parmi l’amour de Dieu”—

was the perfect saint, fusing the two halves of human experience in one
whole. These two aspects of love he could not separate, for they seemed
to him equally the flowers of a completed life. Even God, he thought,
would find it difficult to decide between them.

             “Dans une belle vie, il n’est que de beaux jours,
             Dans une belle vie il fait toujours beau temps.
             Dieu la déroule toute et regarde longtemps
             Quel amour est plus cher entre tous les amours.

             Ainsi Dieu ne sait pas, ainsi le divin Maître
             Ne sait quel retenir et placer hors du lieu
             Et pour lequel tenir, et s’il faut vraiment mettre
             L’amour de la patrie après l’amour de Dieu.“

This mystical patriotism was his great gift to the mind of France; and
it was to her regeneration that his work was really consecrated. It was
the ideal France, the “eldest daughter of God,” which claimed his
devotion and inspired his finest verse. She is the creative nation,
planter of gardens and sower of seeds, the nation which turns all things
to the purposes of more abundant life:

    “Ici, dit Dieu, dans cette douce France, ma plus noble création,
    Dans cette saine Lorraine,
    Ici ils sont bons jardiniers....
    Toutes les sauvageries du monde ne valent pas un beau jardin
       français.
    Honnête, modeste, ordonné.
    C’est là que j’ai cueilli mes plus belles âmes.”

Péguy saw France in the laborious and heroic past, with her ancient
traditions of culture, liberty, and order: patient, scrupulous,
diligent, tending her seedbeds and weeding her fields—for good work was
always in his eyes the earnest of a healthy soul. He hoped for her in
the future: a future to be conditioned, not by the progressive character
of her political institutions, but by her freshness, her eternal youth;
above all, by her spirit of hope.

    “Peuple, les peuples de la terre te dirent léger
    Parce que tu es un peuple prompt....
    Mais moi, je t’ai pesé, dit Dieu, et je ne t’ai point trouvé léger.
    O peuple inventeur de la cathédrale, je ne t’ai point trouvé léger
       en foi.
    O peuple inventeur de la croisade, je ne t’ai point trouvé léger en
       charité.
    Quant à l’espérance, il vaut mieux ne pas en parler, il n’en a que
       pour eux.”

Owing everything to the love and industry of his mother and
grandmother—for his father died before his birth—it was natural that
Péguy should find in faithful and laborious womanhood the ultimate types
of human truth and goodness. Two such types appear again and again in
his poems, as living symbols of the national soul: St. Geneviève,
“vigilante bergère, aïeule et paroissienne,” whose prayer and fortitude
saved Paris, and, above all, St. Joan of Arc, “enfant échappée à de
pauvres familles,” in whom the dual love of God and man, carried into
vigorous action, availed to change the history of France. In the three
_Mystères_ which he wrote in her honour, he extols the three qualities
in which he found the secret of St. Joan’s holiness, significance, and
power; her ardent charity, her unquenchable hope, the childlike
innocence of her soul. Charity, the passionate longing to help and save,
urged her to rescue France from its miseries. “Il y a tant de manque, il
y a tant à demander.” In this profound sense of ill to be mended, her
mission, and in Péguy’s view the mission of all Christians, takes its
rise. Hope, the ever-renewed belief in a possible perfection, “invisible
et immortelle et impossible à éteindre,” gave her courage to obey her
Voices and strength to perform apparently impossible acts. Because she
was a child at heart, with a child’s unsullied outlook, simplicity and
zest—its entire aloofness from the unreal complications of adult
existence—she had an assurance, a freshness, a power of initiative,
which carried her through and past the superhuman difficulties of her
task:

            “Ce grand général qui prenait des bastilles
            Ainsi qu’on prend le ciel, c’est en sautant dedans,
            N’était devant la herse et parmi les redans
            Qu’une enfant échappée à de pauvres familles....

            “Elle est montée au ciel ensemble jeune et sage
            A peine parvenue au bord de son printemps
            Au bord de sa tendresse et de son jeune temps
            A peine au débarqué de son premier village.”

St. Joan thus appears as the supreme example of the practical mystic;
rooted in the soil, and agent of that saving force which will never rest
until it has resolved the discords of man’s life and inducted him into
the kingdom of reality. She is for Péguy not only the redeemer and
incarnate soul of France, but also, in her spirit of prayer and her
militant vigour, the leader and patron of all those initiates of hope
who “seek to mend the universal ill.”

             “Heureux ceux d’entre nous qui la verront paraître
             Le regard plus ouvert que d’une âme d’enfant,
             Quand ce grand général et ce chef triomphant
             Rassemblera sa troupe aux pieds de notre maître.”

It is easy enough to exhibit Péguy’s defects, both literary and
temperamental. Among the first we must reckon his tiresome mannerisms
and apparent absence of form, his digressions and lapses into the
didactic, his exaggerated love of repetition: the way in which his
verse, in such a poem as _Eve_, seems to advance by means of passionate
reiterations, stanza after stanza, like the waves of one tide,
distinguished only by the smallest verbal changes. On the temperamental
side we must acknowledge his intractable arrogance, a complete want of
sympathy with his opponents’ point of view, something too of the morose
distrustfulness of the peasant: faults which persisted side by side with
his real mystical enthusiasm, for his nature never completely unified
itself. On one side a spiritual poet, on the other side he was and
remained to the last a violent and often cruel pamphleteer: carrying on
against both private enemies and public movements a guerilla warfare in
which he seemed to himself to be, like his patroness, fighting the cause
of his Voices and of the right. As with most poets who are also
missionaries, apostolic zeal sometimes got the better of artistic
discretion. In the fury of his invective against the folly,
priggishness, cowardice, and love of comfort of the modern world, he
seized any image that came to hand; sometimes with disconcerting effect.
No other poet, perhaps, would have dared to introduce cachets of
antipyrine into his indignant catalogue of our weaknesses and crimes.
Yet, as against this, what other poet of our day has achieved so wide a
sweep of emotion; has revealed to us so great and so earnest a
personality? When we consider his range, the tender simplicity of his
passages on little children, the sublime Hymn to the Virgin and Address
to Night in _La Deuxième Vertu_, the solemn yet ardent celebration of
“les armes de Jésus”—suffering, poverty, failure, death—in _La
Tapisserie de Sainte Geneviève_; and Eve, with its alternate notes of
irony and exaltation, its exquisite concluding rhapsody on St. Geneviève
and St. Joan of Arc, the “two shepherdesses of France”—then we forget
the sermons and the diatribes, and we feel that the world lost in Péguy
a great Christian poet. He died, as we may be sure that he would have
wished to do, in defence of the country which he so passionately loved:
and a strangely poignant interest attaches to those verses in his last
published work which he devotes to the “poor sinners” redeemed by this
most sacred of deaths:

         “Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour la terre charnelle,
         Mais pourvu que ce fût dans une juste guerre.
         Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour quatre coins de terre.
         Heureux ceux qui sont morts d’une mort solennelle....

         “Heureux les grands vainqueurs. Paix aux hommes de guerre.
         Qu’ils soient ensevelis dans un dernier silence.
         Que Dieu mette avec eux dans la juste balance
         Un peu de ce terrain d’ordure et de poussière.

         “Que Dieu mette avec eux dans le juste plateau
         Ce qu’ils ont tant aimé, quelques grammes de terre.
         Un peu de cette vigne, un peu de ce coteau,
         Un peu de ce ravin sauvage et solitaire....

         “Mère, voici vos fils et leur immense armée.
         Qu’ils ne soient pas jugés sur leur seule misère.
         Que Dieu mette avec eux un peu de cette terre
         Qui les a tant perdus et qu’ils ont tant aimée.”

      PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LTD.,
      BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E. 1, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.




 ● Transcriber’s Notes:
    ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
    ○ Footnotes have been moved to follow the sections in which they are
      referenced.





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